[pjmlp]

> Last but not least, C had not yet taken the world by storm, and a lot of those developers and companies had never even heard of C, and the ones that had heard of it were pretty dubious, more often than not.

Specially since some of us were exposed to languages (Modula-2, Turbo Pascal) that were more feature rich than C while allowing similar performance levels on the same systems.

[DougMerritt]

Certainly, although of course it depends on which range of years we're talking about, and which platforms we're talking about; you're talking about later years than PDP 11 C and more capable platforms than the "NES" mentioned above.

Prior to Turbo Pascal there was UCSD Pascal, which was extremely popular but not high performance.

But the whole idea that any high level language could be even close to competitive with assembly was a very radical idea considered laughable by the mainstream, for many years, which I think is the underlying idea here.

Another language worth mentioning is Bliss, a pioneering high level systems programming language roughly contemporary with early C, with high levels of efficiency and optimization, and was famous in some circles but not with the mainstream.

As I recall, that one eventually dropped by the wayside because it was too closely tied to DEC architectures. It may or may not have been ported to others, but it did not have (relatively) easy portability as a feature anyway, unlike the Johnson C compiler, which is often claimed to be the first such.

I wasn't a Turbo Pascal user, but wasn't it, too, tied to the one platform?

Wirth's languages after Pascal, I dunno; everyone heard of them but they were never that widely adopted. I guess I'm unclear on why.

[pjmlp]

> But the whole idea that any high level language could be even close to competitive with assembly was a very radical idea considered laughable by the mainstream, for many years, which I think is the underlying idea here.

From the papers I used to dig during my degree, I would assume Algol derivatives were already quite competitive, given that quite a few OS were implemented in them.

> I wasn't a Turbo Pascal user, but wasn't it, too, tied to the one platform?

Yes, to the PC. I eventually moved into C++ as time came to move along to more portable languages, as C was too primitive for my taste and I had just got hold of Turbo C++.

> Wirth's languages after Pascal, I dunno; everyone heard of them but they were never that widely adopted. I guess I'm unclear on why.

I was lucky to discover Oberon, and to use the Native PC version.

It opened my eyes that is it possible to have workstation OS done in GC enabled systems programming languages.

It also made me research Modula-3, Component Pascal, Oberon-2 and Active Oberon.

Coming back to the original point, back when coding for home computers, if performance was an issue, Assembly was the only option (Z80, 68000, x86).

For me, C was something I would see mentioned in some computer magazines about those new expensive UNIX workstations.

[DougMerritt]

> I would assume Algol derivatives were already quite competitive, given that quite a few OS were implemented in them.

Yes, and PL/1 for systems programming in Multics and IBM systems, etc. (We won't count Burroughs since they literally designed the hardware to be programmed in Algol.)

That shows my comment was far too imprecise; it must have to do with different segments of the industry or something.

> back when coding for home computers, if performance was an issue, Assembly was the only option (Z80, 68000, x86).

Indeed.

[SloopJon]

> Another language worth mentioning is Bliss

I work with a former member of the DEC compiler team who brings up BLISS from time to time. One feature he liked was the control over register assignment, making it easy to keep frequently used variables in registers across function calls.

I'd be curious to know whether BLISS lives on at VMS Software, Inc. as they port to AMD64.