From: jcoffin{at}taeus.com
To: c_echo{at}yahoogroups.com

At 12:00 AM 8/4/2003 +0100, you wrote:

[ ... ]

>Not known to me. It's still K&R not R&K.

Which has little to do with anything -- many fine books about C don't list
dmr as an author at all.  I've never seen a specific reason given for Brian
Kernighan being listed first, but they might easily have simply put them in
alphabetical order.  It's also been pointed out that Brian Kernighan was
the larger contributor to the book, if not to the language at all.

[ ...  ]

>JC> It was presented sooner, for those who paid any attention.
>
>I have no formal training as a librarian and don't read the
>preface or any of the other junk on those pages other than the
>copyright date and what edition (how many reprints etc.).

It's your loss -- as you might guess from the bit I quoted, the
introductory material is often quite interesting (though I can't remember
much that seems to me like it would mean much to a librarian).

>JC> Another point many people find interesting is that dmr
>JC> didn't design the I/O library either. That was the work of
>JC> Mike Lesk (whose relative obscurity I believe is a cosmic
>JC> punishment for having invented gets).
>
>Seems that there were many 'contributors' but one person got
>the lion's share of the credit even though that was unfair to
>the others.

Another place you miss out by skipping over the introductory material.  I
suppose Dennis may be _given_ most of the credit, but he's quite careful
not to _claim_ it exclusively -- just for example, K&R1 names 26 other
people to whom they give thanks for various assistance (and yes, Mike Lesk
is among those).  In the second edition, they reproduce the preface to the
first edition, and add another as well, containing another list of 29
contributors (though there's considerable duplication between those two lists).

Dennis also spent quite a bit of his HOPL II presentation giving credit to
quite a number of other people, some well-known (e.g. Ken Thompson, Rob
Pike) others perhaps less so (e.g. Bonnie Thompson, Bob Morris, Alan
Snyder) as well as some who are well-known to those versed in UNIX lore,
but probably less so elsewhere (e.g. Doug MdIlroy and Steve Johnson).

Just FWIW, the language designer being the second author of the manual is
hardly new or unique -- e.g. once upon a time many of us used "Jensen and
Wirth Pascal", which was defined by Niklaus Wirth, not Kathleen Jensen.

Of course, mentioning that makes me feel a bit old -- the time when owning
a copy of the _Pascal User Manual and Report_ marked me as young and
progressive is long past!

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