Linked by Alexandru Lazar on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:13 UTC
In the age of dynamic languages and closures, most of you have probably heard of a mighty dragon called Lisp (which stands for LISt Processing), whose fans look almost with despise at other languages rediscovering it. Invented half a century ago, Lisp went on to become a de facto standard in the world of AI research, and has stood behind a handful of very neat inventions in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the long AI winter and the drift of technology towards other paradigms have almost lead to forgetting Lisp alltogether; IT has only recently started to rediscover parts of what made Lisp so cool back then.
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Member since:
2008-06-07
No. At the time C was invented, the mainstream high level languages were COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol and PL/I. These languages do not handle e.g. pointers and bit operations as well as C does.
C was invented specifically as a system programming language (so they wouldn't have to rewrite OS for different architectures).