Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language, dies

CNET News ^ | Oct 13 | Steven Musil

[budj]

"Dennis Ritchie, an internationally renowned computer scientist who created the C programming language, has died at age 70. ..."

[5thGenTexan]

Inventor of Unix?

Definitely involved in the creation of Unix. Not sure how much time he spent on the actual code base, but C and Unix are joined at the hip: there would not be one without the other.

C language was being developed by AT&T and it evolved along side Unix. Many of the obscure things in C are there to help the Unix developers solve a problem they were facing at the time. Having pointers to pointers solved a performance problem in the scheduler, so they added it to the language. The scheduler gave us gotos as well.

I got my start in computers in 1986 as a repair technician and taught myself programming by reading AT&T System III Unix source and system diagnostics also written in C.

[JRandomFreeper]

they'd catch the meaning.

Did you ever use yacc to pre-parse your code to correct your 'idiomatic' usage that was just incorrect?

Admit it.

You have a list somewhere.

I'll go first. I dated a fat girl. and i used yacc to translate my gibberish into C.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

Cold busted. But I still have a copy of WordStar(tm) on a SSSD 8" floppy. And unless the catz got to it, a copy of the original DBase(tm) executable.

I was precocious.

I couldn't help it. ;)

I've still got the text for AWK, SED, and grep on the shelf.

But I'm weird that way.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

taught myself programming by reading AT&T System III Unix source

You make stong medicine. Women worried about glove size.

/johnny

[Explorer89]

That small, white K&R was my bible for many years. God Speed.

[5thGenTexan]

Hehehe. It's taken decades to break some of the habits I picked up in the belly of the beast.

8^)

[5thGenTexan]

I've still got the text for AWK, SED, and grep on the shelf.

I just bought the Perl book (there's more than one way to do it)...

[grunt03]

Did you ever use yacc to pre-parse your code to correct your 'idiomatic' usage that was just incorrect?

I used yacc, lex, and cc in the 80's on Onyx and Xenix machines. It was a painful way to write applications. GCC and Turbo C came out around '86-87, and I haven't directly touched yacc or lex since :)

[JRandomFreeper]

I just bought the Perl book

Larry did good work, too.

/johnny

[MarkL]

As Nancy Leveveson of MIT said, it is one of the most error-prone languages ever designed.

It's NOT error prone... It simply assumes that the programmer REALLY wants to do what you told it to do. I learned C out of the 1st edition of the "White Book." Back before the ANSI standard and sissy features foisted on the users of other languages, like type checking and boundary checking on arrays: You must have had a reason to write to the 3000th element of that 10 element array!

Mark

[5thGenTexan]

OK, I gotta know: I don’t know if you are married, but if you are and you are watching The Big Bang Theory with your wife, does she look at you and laugh? Or does that only happen just me?

[5thGenTexan]

The most dreadful words from my Microprocessors prof in school: “it’s doing EXACTLY what you told it to” and walked away (it was ASM then, but the story is the same for C).

[JRandomFreeper]

But yacc, sorry.... bison, these days, I suppose, does do a good job of substituting one list for another.

Bad pre-compiler, but pretty good at what it does, if you take it literally.

When you see 'x', replace it with 'y'.

That part works great.

Good that they leave stubs back to things like yacc and grep and ls for us old guys that just type that at a prompt.

Because yacc is now bison, grep is now egrep, and ls? Maybe it's still ls, but they change the stuff behind the delimiter.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

You must have had a reason to write to the 3000th element of that 10 element array!

Actually... Some of us used that on purpose to write directly to memory.

And then came heap and stack and garbage collection.

And Firefox, with it's massive memory leak.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

: I don’t know if you are married, but if you are and you are watching The Big Bang Theory with your wife, does she look at you and laugh?

I'm not only single, I'm hostile and single. I've bought houses for several women that hate me that I used to be married to.

I even took an oath.

And that is difficult in this part of Texas, where the young ladies are so... young, and ladies...

But to answer your question, no.

I don't own a televisor thingy.

And I don't have a spousal unit.

And if I did, and if I did, No, they never laugh. They weep silently behind a veil. Thus has zaruthra spoken.

/johnny

[RussP]

I’ve just read some of this book, and I now realize that they *are* serious. Unix and C/C++ *do* have some serious fundamental flaws. But you can’t really blame Ritchie for the fact that others were so eager to adopt his system. As others have pointed out, he was really designing a system for himself and his co-workers, not the world.

[Erasmus]

Nay, fondle not the Chromium Switch!

Rather, solder ye thine array of magic diodes, and wire thee thine string of hallowed E-cores.

Thus shall ye find redemption among the ancient elders of the Code.

[stripes1776]

Definitely involved in the creation of Unix. Not sure how much time he spent on the actual code base, but C and Unix are joined at the hip: there would not be one without the other.

Unix was the first OS written in a higher-lever language than assembly and machine code. Ken Thompson started the Unix project with Ritchie's help. Thompson invented a new language called B, but it had too many limitations. So Ritchie started NB (New B) but soon renamed the language C as coming after B. Writing most of the OS in C allowed Unix to be ported to a lot of different hardware. And this contributed to the popularity of Unix.

It's sad to see Ritchie pass. He won't be soon forgotten.

[JRandomFreeper]

Have you heard what the DARPA manager said about him choosing quads for addresses?

Hell, it was an experiment, who knew it would turn into the internet. Vint and Bob did their best.

10^8 would have seemed like plenty to me. But I have limited vision.

/johnny

[Erasmus]

"For I am the 777, here to teach you octal."

In other words, you are All Things to All People.