Language Niches (long)

[Tim Peters]

[Paul Prescod]
> ...
> C became popular between twenty and thirty years ago.

Twenty at best.  In the early 80's, I was on an internal committee at Cray
Research tasked to pick a system implementation language to replace most
uses of Cray assembler (ah, CAL!).  It came down to (heavily extended)
Pascal or (heavily extended) Fortran.  We unanimously dismissed C because,
at the time, it appeared to be limited to universities, yet even Cray's
university customers had absolutely no interest in it.  My track record at
predicting The Next Big Thing is unarguably consistent <wink>.

c-rode-in-on-the-back-of-the-unix-virus-ly y'rs  - tim