The C programming language

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
Date: Fri Mar 10 09:08:41 2000

Ethan <erd_at_iname.com> wrote:
>
> Rubbish. My first language was BASIC (like so many kids in the late 1970s),
> followed quickly by 1802 and 6502 machine language (no compiler - stuff
> entered in hex), then, about six years after I started programming, C.
> Working at SRC in 1984, I saw that we had a UNIX machine nestled
> amongst the VAXen running VMS. It was a VAX-11/750 w/2Mb RAM and two
> RK07 drives. I don't have the drives (they were discarded in 1992),
> but I do have _that_ 11/750
> (s/n BT000354) now upgraded to 8Mb w/SI9900, Fuji Eagle, etc. We swapped out
> different sets of RK07 packs to run various Unices to conform to the
> customer's configuration - 4.0BSD, 4.1BSD and SYSIII, IIRC. I still have the
> VAX SYSIII tapes somewhere, but who knows if they are still legible after
> all this time. Anyway, way back then, I'd heard about UNIX and decided I
> wanted a piece of it. I got an account, borrowed a copy of the K&R book
> and used it as a reference to write my first C program. It was an
> abomination as far as style goes, but it did work - it converted a text table
> of board handle numbers into a formatted picture of the contents of all of
> our PDP-11 and VAXen, a job I'd do today in perl and probably HTML.
>
> What I've found from personal experience is that to really _learn_ a
> programming language, I need a project to keep me going past the learning
> cliff.

The advantage of assembly language is it's closeness to machine
language. As an old hardware guy I can visualize those bits and bytes
in the 11/34 going from the A mux through the ALU...etc.

C's abstraction begins to bore me and it seems a write only language.

Bill

bpechter_at_monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
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Received on Fri Mar 10 2000 - 09:08:41 GMT