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Comment by rahen | Hacker News Reader

Page 50: "A compromise between assemblers and high-level languages, C helps programmers avoid the idiosyncrasies of particular machines".

Interesting. I thought C appeared as a (very) high level language back in 1983, when development on microcomputers was still mostly done in assembly. This article was published August 1983 and Turbo Pascal v1.0 was only released in November, so I'm not sure what high level languages were available on microcomputers back then, besides BASIC.

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BASIC and (UCSD) Pascal were the mainstream choices on 8-bit micros... with BASIC being far and away the dominant language in the amateur and low-volume professional market mainly due to ease of use and that it came bundled with every 8-bit micro I recall using. On 16-bit micros that was around the time more powerful high-level languages started to become available (for example, XLISP was released in 1983. AmigaBASIC released in 1985 was quite powerful for its time). So you are correct that options were limited in '83 mainly because 8-bit micros were very, very storage (RAM and disk) constrained.

It was commercial, student and hard core amateur, developers who developed in assembly in the 80's. C was only ever 'high level' when compared to assembly/machine code. Manual memory management was an indicator that it wasn't high level at all. That said, much commercial software was still written in assembly back then as that was the only way to wring the performance out of an 8-bit and even early 16-bit micros. It was the transition to 16-bit, when all that 6502/6800 code became obsolete when C really started to take over.

In 1983 I programmed in both assembly and in C - and usually flipped back and forth between the two by using the assembly output of the C compiler. My experience was that C was a low-level language in that you could fairly easily see how that C was transformed into the assembly. It was a great way, actually, to learn assembly.

I bet you would have killed for Compiler Explorer (godbolt.org) in the '80s. Actually, I wish I could integrate it directly into my editor today. (Well, preferably something running locally rather than a web service.)

Try RMSbolt.

Not really compatible with Windows though.

You can, in fact, run it locally.

Logo definitely existed on micros in the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

> Apple Logo for the Apple II Plus and Apple Logo Writer for the Apple IIe, developed by Logo Computer Systems, Inc. (LCSI), were the most broadly used and prevalent early implementations of Logo that peaked in the early to mid-1980s.

> Aquarius LOGO was released in 1982 on cartridge by Mattel for the Aquarius home computer.

> Atari Logo was released on cartridge by Atari for the Atari 8-bit family.

> Color Logo was released in 1983 on cartridge (26-2722) and disk (26-2721) by Tandy for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

> Commodore Logo was released, with the subtitle "A Language for Learning", by Commodore Electronics. It was based on MIT Logo and enhanced by Terrapin, Inc. The Commodore 64 version (C64105) was released on diskette in 1983; the Plus/4 version (T263001) was released on cartridge in 1984.[9][10]

And so on.

There was even an issue of Byte featuring Logo, August 1982. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08

My first C compiler came out around then.

Are you Walter Bright, the creator of D? If yes, I was thinking of writing a proposal for WG14 some time in the future regarding slices/fat pointers. Would it be ok if I modelled it after the extension found in the betterC compiler, at least when it comes to syntax?

Yes, that's me. I even wrote an unofficial proposal for C slices!

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html

Feel free to model your work on this and/or on D as you see fit. It'd be great if you made it into an official proposal. That one thing will greatly benefit C programs, much more than any of the other improvements in the C Standard I've seen over the years.

Thank you for your answer and the inspiration! I'll try my best!

I can help with review and defense of it, too.

Note that we are already looking into this. I had some proposals for C23 on how to improve arrays in C, but I could not finish this in time. But help is welcome.

Oh, I didn't know that, nice! Is there some kind of draft of a paper which one can read in order to contribute/help/see the state of the proposal?

UCSD Pascal was widespread, fairly portable but expensive and slow. If there wasn’t a FORTH for your machine you might write one for yourself.

I was there in 1983, development was certainly not done mostly in assembly.

Likewise; I wrote a lot of Fortran in those days.

There was a lot of BASIC, but at least on microcomputers, there was a lot of assembly (if you needed any performance).

I was writing games, and there could be a bit of BASIC wrapper, but the rest was assembler.

Ditto here. C, Pascal and Forth were what I was using in those days. I did some 6502, 6800 and 68000 assembly, but only when needed.

Arguably the most important commercial applications on the IBM PC were written in assembly: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

It was a competitive advantage early in the 1980s, then turned into a handicap by the end of the decade when the performance and memory tricks didn’t matter as much as graphics and GUI.

True: people rolled their eyes at anybody trying to field a commercially successful product not coded in assembly. Languages were for proofs-of-concept, and for toys. And yes, that changed as 1990 approached.

P-Lisp ran on an Apple II: https://archive.org/details/P-Lisp_v3.0.1

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