[DUG] [offtopic] Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies

[Paul Heinz]

John wrote: 

> The original C compiler was written to build Unix  on PDP-11s 
> (Unix was the first operating system written almost entirely 
> in a high level language - namely C)  both done by Kernighan 
> and Ritchie.
>  
> Their book on the C language was the standard reference when 
> I was learning programming.

Yeah - me too. I still have the K&R book and the Harbison & Steele book
on my bookshelf which I taught myself C from back in the day. Ah,
nostalgia :-)
  
> One of them was asked years later in the light of later 
> technology what they would have done differently in designing 
> the OS, and he said after some pause  that he would have 
> called one of the OS API calls create rather than creat

I think he did add NUL terminated strings to that list later :-)
Just think of the buffer overflows that would have been avoided...

Cheers,
  Paul.