Re: http://www-cs-faculty. stanford.edu/∼uno/programs/tcalc.w.gz

[Philip Taylor]

Philip Taylor wrote:

> Had I bothered to read Don's opening words on the page from which I originally followed the link, I would clearly have seen :
>
>>
>>     Programs to Read
>>
>> I writ
>>

To what extent Don was motivated to switch from Web/Pascal to Cweb/C by (a) the diminishing availability of good Pascal compilers, (b) the increasing ubiquity of C, and/or (c) strengths which he perceived in C and which he saw lacking in Pascal, I may never know (has he written on this subject) but I am nonetheless intrigued by what must now be an unanswerable question : /would the founding fathers of modern computer science (Dijkstra, Hoare, van Wijngaarten, Wirth, ...) have willingly switched from Algol 60 / 68 / Pascal / ... to C or to one of its derivatives ?

/I know from personal correspondence that Kees Koster, for example, saw considerable merit in C, and even claimed that it included many of the ideas that underlie Algol-68 (a point on which he and I initially failed to agree, but sadly he died before we could reach any real agreement) but I find the idea of (for example) Dijkstra willing adopting C as something totally impossible to believe.  What do others think ?

/Philip Taylor/
//
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