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

At 09:01 PM 8/2/2003 +0100, you wrote:

[ ... ]

>The above URL points to a current interview with Kernighan of
>K&R fame who tells the interviewer that he had nothing to do
>with writing the C programming language, it was mainly
>Ritchie's work.

This fact has been quite well-known for a long time.

>I was a bit surprised by this revelation and a few others that
>Kernighan mentions during this interview re: AWK and others.
>
>Unfortunate for Ritchie that this information wasn't presented
>sooner than it was but I guess better late than never?

It was presented sooner, for those who paid any attention.  The preface of
K&R1 says: "C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX
operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie."

In case you happen to care, Dennis Ritchie has also made it clear who
contributed which parts to the book: "Although we worked closely together
on this book, there was a clear division of labor: Kernighan wrote almost
all the expository material, wile I was responsible for the appendix
containing the reference manual and the chapter on interfacing with the
UNIX system." (from his presentation on the development of C at the ACM's
second conference on the History of Programming Languages).

Another point many people find interesting is that dmr didn't design the
I/O library either.  That was the work of Mike Lesk (whose relative
obscurity I believe is a cosmic punishment for having invented gets).

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