[mike_hearn]

Windows didn't standardize on C. It was mostly assembly and some Pascal in the beginning with C and C++ later.

Microsoft have always viewed C as just another language, it's not privileged in the way UNIX privileges C. By implication, the C standard library was provided by your compiler and shipped with your app as a dependency on Windows, it wasn't provided by the operating system.

These days that's been changing, partly because lots of installers dumped the MSVC runtime into c:\windows\system and so whether it was a part of the OS or not became blurred and partly because Microsoft got more willing to privilege languages at the OS level. Even so, the Windows group retains a commitment to language independence that other operating systems just don't have. WinRT comes with lots of metadata for binding it into other languages, for example.

[Narishma]

> Windows didn't standardize on C. It was mostly assembly and some Pascal in the beginning with C and C++ later.

No, it was never Pascal. It was always C from the beginning. You may have been confused by them using the Pascal calling convention because it was generally faster on the 16-bit CPUs of the time.

[pjmlp]

Apple was the one going with Pascal for the OS, originally the Object Pascal linage was started at Apple, in collaboration with Niklaus Wirth that gave feedback on the design.