XPost: alt.folklore.computers   
   From: commodorejohn@gmail.com   
      
   On Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:39:02 +0000   
   Richard Kettlewell  wrote:   
      
   > Also, the "call the OS" part of userland programs has to be   
   > represented somehow in whatever language they are written in. C made   
   > that partially independent of the underlying OS in the sense that the   
   > stdio.h functions work much the same on a range of platforms (but it   
   > does make some assumptions about the OS’s underlying IO model). As   
   > well as improving portability, it means a bit less re-learning for   
   > programmers as we migrate around platforms.   
      
   Yeah - C isn't perfect, but they did a couple of very critical Right   
   Things in *A.* making as much of the runtime environment as possible   
   into standard C language constructs (everything but the bare bones is   
   Just Another Function, and if you don't like it you can write your own)   
   and *B.* providing (for the time) a fairly comprehensive std. library   
   that doesn't make *too* many assumptions about the larger environment;   
   you can write batch-oriented programs just as easily as interactive   
   ones, and nothing is bent toward a record-oriented model like vanilla   
   Pascal assumes. (There *is* a bit of a bent towards line-oriented input   
   vs. raw character streams, under the hood, but I'm not 100% on whether   
   that's a C thing or a Unix thing.)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)