Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by comonoid 281 days ago
C was designed to be compiled with a single-pass compiler.
2 comments
Joker_vD 281 days ago
It wasn't; the original C compiler had two passes, and built expression trees in the first pass which the second pass would turn into assembly (and the original as on UNIX also had two passes).
link
whobre 280 days ago
C was not designed at all. It evolved from B, by adding types to it.
link
fuzztester 280 days ago
Yes.

And B evolved from BCPL:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

I had read the book about BCPL by Martin Richards, creator of the language. it was quite interesting. IIRC, after describing the language, he gave some examples of small system software routines or utilities, written in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Richards_(computer_sc...

link