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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Philip Taylor wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:874cb119-4f27-0495-691a-73b62f6d88c5@Hellenic-Institute.Uk">
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Had I bothered to read Don's opening words on the page from which
I originally followed the link, I would clearly have seen :<br>
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<h2>Programs to Read </h2>
<p> I writ<br>
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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 : <i>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 ?<br>
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</i>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 ?<br>
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<i>Philip Taylor</i><br>
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