[Info-vax] Dennis Ritchie has passed on.

[Simon Clubley]

On 2011-10-13, Jojimbo <jjgessling at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 13, 9:58 am, Rich Jordan <jor... at ccs4vms.com> wrote:
>> Dennis Ritchie has passed away.  He was (one of?) the creator(s) of
>> the C programming language and also a primary developer of Unix.
>>

It's sad he has died. I wonder how many people praising Steve Jobs will
remember Dennis Ritchie and understand his importance to computing.
(Although at least to the BBC's credit they do have a article on the news
site.)

>
> Very sad indeed.  I can barely remember that back in the day you used
> to get a K&R book with your shiny new Ultrix system.  Sort of like
> getting a physics book with your new car, at least I always thought
> so.  I personally always struggled with C although I wrote plenty of
> code with it.  My main strategy was add "&" and if that didn't work
> add another, or remove them altogether until the access violation went
> away.  Remember the "register" declaration?  Now that was close to the
> iron.
>

I think I last needed to use register about 15 years ago.

These days, the compiler does a good job of deciding what needs to be
in a register (at least on ARM and AVR with gcc; I don't usually look at
the generated code for desktop type systems).

The only register/memory location based C declaration I use these days is
volatile in order to tell the compiler to stay away from hardware
registers.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world