Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and more, has died

Oct 13, 2011 38 Replies

Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and more, has died

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A man who changed the world.


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Yes, the news has made the rounds lately. A friend of his writing here:

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I bought my copy of "The C Programming Language" in 1978, the year I first worked on the v6 Unix kernel. I still have that copy on the book shelf. The language and the experiences using it changed my life in many ways.

Jon

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(sigh) Looks like 2011 is going to be "one of those years". Personally, I've "buried" 5 friends this year. Expect as many as three more by year end. :-(

I always used to marvel at how well I "coped" with "getting older": vision changes, aches and pains, etc. Now, I say the toughest part of getting older is "knowing dead people".

:(

Jan Panteltje expounded in news:j76ir7$a16$ snipped-for-privacy@news.albasani.net:

But plan9 isn't done yet.

Warren

printf("goodbye world");

+++++++

That should be on his headstone!

tm

Well, lets get a can of spray paint!

Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------

My copy 'grew legs' one day... deep sigh.

for both looses,

George H.

Speaking of headstones, does anybody know DeForest Kelly's "official" epitaph? I've heard it's "I'm dead, Jim" but haven't been able to refute or confirm that one way or the other.

Thanks, Rich

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I _learned_ C from K&R at my elbow and a coach looking over my shoulder. The coach's prescription for debugging was to load up the program with printfs, and he didn't like "for" loops. For an infinite loop, he recommended "while 1"; "for (;;)" does the same thing with fewer instructions. (it compiles to an unconditional "jump.")

Nowadays, since I finally learned to write my code right, I only need printfs when I actually need something printed, and usually I try to avoid them; I hear the printf library function is quite a behemoth; it takes less resources to simply build a string and "puts" it.

Cheers! Rich

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A modern compiler would have no problem compiling for(;;){}, while(1){}, and for that matter

foo: {} goto foo;

into the same machine code.

Debuggers are like logic analyzers--they aren't normally necessary, but when you're stuck, there's absolutely no substitute.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

Isn't that printf("goodbye world\n");

Anyway, apparently everything computery was invented by Steve Jobs. Just ask the media.

I kid you not, I met a fanboi that thought Apple invented MP3. Not merely the player, but the data format too.

What do you expect from anyone who has drank some "Apple flavored KoolAide"?

You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

It is an LCD headstone, programmed in C.

For whatever it's worth, I was using MSC 5.0; it has a "show me the assembler source" option, and "while (1)" compiles to a test, comparing

1 to 0, THEN makes a conditional jump. "for(;;)" compiles to a jump.

Maybe they've fixed that by now - it was about twenty-five years ago.

But these days, I guess almost nobody actually writes real code any more, they just pass objects around or some s*it.

Thanks! Rich

ha,

I think he forgot to invent a different symbol .. something like /nu for next universe instead of next line.

The fact that you do not know one way or the other is quite a tell.

On a sunny day (Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:08:28 -0700 (PDT)) it happened brent wrote in :

Actually you want printf("goodbye world\n"); At least in Unix, without the '\n', the buffers will not be emptied, and you'd see nothing. Or if you did it in a loop, with a whole lot of printf()s, at some point it would output some text, when the buffers got full. Or you could specify console output one byte at the time setbuf(stdout, NULL); before you start calling printf().

miso schrieb:

Hello,

did you tell him that MP3 was not invented in the USA? It was invented here in Erlangen, Germany.

Bye

Would that be one from the seventies?

*snicker*

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