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Comment by grymoire1 | Hacker News Reader

>The complaining gets old, but then again, memory leaks, overrruns and underruns and other C footguns get old, too.

Agreed. C is an old language, but at the time it was a very good language. One can argue the choice nowadays, but comparing it to PL/1?

A quick search on Linkedin:

* 117 Jobs for PL/1 programmers * 300,000+ jobs for C programmers

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I'm not promoting the PL/I language, although I did do significant work with it back in the day, including the Prime operating system which had huge chunks written in a system-programming version of PL/I. PL/I likely never "made it" because it's a huge, bloated language that's hard to implement, compilers were scant, and they were expensive. For the curious, here are Prime's 2 system-programming subsets, the first, PL/P, is from 1978:

PLP: https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/prime/pet/pe-t-483%20PLP%201... SPL: https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/prime/pet/pe-t-xxx%20SPL%20R...

I am promoting the concept of strings having a built-in capacity and current length, and the language compiler and runtime understanding that rather than trying to use a byte array as a string. Even compiled BASIC I used in the late 70's had real strings like that.

> but comparing it to PL/1?

I think the point was that a language designed when pterodactyls ruled the skies had a better string implementation than C. Regardless, C's not going anywhere. You still need something close to the hardware that has better ergonomics than assembly language to implement that new safe language that mythical safe OS will be written in :-)

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