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From: Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:17:12 -0700
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On 28/09/2024 14:20, John Levine wrote:
> C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than any of the
> plausible alternatives at the time.

I was late to discovering C. In the 1970's I lived in Denmark, and our 
terminals, printers, keyboards etc were using a national version of the 
ISO standard interchange code that Americans kn ow as ASCII.
Since Danish have three unique (well sort-of shared with Swedish and 
Norvegian) vowels at the end of the alphabet (æ ø å / Æ Ø Å), these were 
allocated at the end of the alphabet - after z / Z. When you look at the 
ASCII character table, you will see that each of these conflicts with 
significant symbols of the C language ({ \ } / [ | ]). This created a 
strong disincentive to experiment with a "fringe" programming language.

It really was not until I got to California that it became easy to write 
C. And by then, I was working on VMS and Unix (V7 on a pdp11/70, soon 
replaced by 4.2BSD on a VAX-11/750).

Back when ACC stood for Associated Computer Consultants, I became 
lars@acc - which then became lars@acc.arpa, even though we landed on the 
MILNET side of the divide.