[dwheeler]

To be fair to Ken Thompson, he did ask for a better citation and used the new citation in later versions.

Here's the quote from "Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation": "This suggestion proved an inspiration to Ken Thompson who actually implemented the self-inserting compiler trap door into an early version of UNIX. Thompson described his trap door in his 1984 Turing Award paper [40], and attributed the idea to an “unknown Air Force document,” and he asked for a better citation. The document in question is in fact the Multics Security Evaluation report, and we gave a new copy of the report to Thompson after his paper was published. Thompson has corrected his citation in a reprint of the paper [39]."

[nickpsecurity]

I didn't know he asked for a better citation. I failed to spot that reading it originally. My mistake. I'll stop making that claim. I might still reference Karger in these discussions even if no credit was accidental as Karger's work deserves more recognition outside academia and actually teaches solutions to crap-load of problems (including this partly).

One more on Thompson. What got me suspicious about him was he had a famous work before that was also done by someone else. The other was much of the C language: its bare-metal nature, few keywords, and so-called "C philosophy" of programmer is in control. The original publications that got acclaim didn't cite the BCPL author, Martin Richards, at all despite him inventing and implementing all those concepts. They were in fact the BCPL philosophy originally with same semantics. Instead, just cited the B language like they did it all on their own in isolation with history crediting the victor that way. Publications that came a while after that started referencing BCPL.

Got that from the talk below which is great for tracing history of C from CPL project to BCPL to C to C++ influence.

https://vimeo.com/132192250

Really gives the big picture why Martin and others would do such languages with the constraints they were operating in. For this discussion, Martin Richards lays foundation for C-like languages with all key features and philosophy of C at 19:40 mark. Illustration of potential plagarism of C from Richards' work at 23:17-27:30. Looks a lot like cases of plagarism I've seen in academia but curious of your opinion as you're much more experienced in academic field. Would you think it was plagarism if you came across both works simultaneously seeing the one that came later without references was making waves?