From: bowman@montana.com   
      
   On Thu, 5 Feb 2026 09:57:45 -0800, John Ames wrote:   
      
      
   > True, but then that's also true (to a lesser extent) of C - certainly   
   > you won't find C23 lambdas in K&R!   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_Literary_Awards   
      
   'Lambda' is sort of poisoned for me. Everyone seemed to come down with   
   lambda envy. I'm not fond of the construct and it certainly can lead to   
   obscure code.   
      
      
   > I'm more curious about the point at which people besides the creators   
   > were using it for stuff. DMR created C as a systems language for Unix,   
   > but it wasn't the first HLL on that system and I don't know how long it   
   > took to catch on with the rest of the Bell Labs crowd, let alone the   
   > world at large;   
      
   My first C compiler was BDS C:   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C   
      
   It was a subset but I certainly got a lot of use out of it. Compared to   
   Z80 assembler it was a dream. So, by 1980 a version of C was alive and   
   well in the CP/M world.   
      
   For MSDOS Microsoft bought Lattice C and developed from there.   
      
   gcc was release in '87. I was using DJGPP (DJGCC at the time) around '90.   
   It spawned both Cygwin and MinGW which had different philosophies. Corrina   
   Vinschen of Cygwin was trying to create Unix on Windows and Mumit Khan was   
   trying to use the gcc toolchain to build native Windows programs. To keep   
   the timeline straight, this was gcc on MSDOS before Linux existed.   
      
   > C++ post-"C with classes" existed by the mid-'80s, but   
   > OOP didn't become a big fad 'til a good few years into the '90s and I   
   > don't know how much use it ever saw before that point.   
      
   Dog and Cat inherit from Animal. Dog says 'woof', Cat says 'meow'. I   
   believe Stroustrup said you can do OOP without inheritance at all. The   
   first couple of editions of his book looked a lot like C -- with classes.   
      
   'Objects' grew in complexity. In our legacy code, which goes back to the   
   mid-'90s, there are a number of object types like OTVehicle, OTPerson,   
   OTComment, etc. They are strictly structs. There is no inheritance or   
   polymorphism, and the entire code body is C except for some C++ stuff I   
   did for the Esri API. Even that complies to a dll that exports C   
   functions.   
      
   Much of it was held together with doubly linked lists. I can build those   
   in my sleep and I've been tempted to see if they are more efficient than   
   C++ container class lists built with templates and iterators.   
      
   I never took to Java's 'everything is a class' model. Too much water under   
   the bridge at that point.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)