History of C

[bearophile]

A short article written by Dennis M. Ritchie about the development of the C language:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

It explains me for the first time why for example in function arguments [] can be used as a pointer to array.

It also explains some mistakes of C design, some of them are fixed by D but some of them are present still, like (in this case of operator precedence):

    if (a == b & c) ...
That usually you want to write as:
    if (a == (b & c)) ...

Or relative to the syntax of deference:

>Sethi [Sethi 81] observed that many of the nested declarations and expressions would become simpler if the indirection operator had been taken as a postfix operator instead of prefix, but by then it was too late to change.<

In future the D2 language will enjoy fixing some more of them, where possible.

Bye,
bearophile