C Programming Language

Yep. C is cool. The Windows kernel is written in it too.

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"Beautiful maiden," answered Candide, "when a man is in love, is jealous, and has been flogged by the Inquisition, he becomes lost to all reflection."

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Original post by sakky
I would have never thought C came from UNIX. Thats sort of cool.

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So where did you think it came from?

I''ve always been partial to C. I have fond memories from back in the ''80s of reading xeroxed papers from the ACM and Siggraph about ray tracing. In the concluding remarks of each paper, they almost always said something like this: "The preceding algorithm has been implemented in C on a DEC VAX 11/780. Tests indicate that..."

Bell Labs, after B... I forget who made it. Practically any C book says where C comes from.

Speaking of which... I have yet to read Accelerated C++... not a newbie but it looked interesting... nice way to teach the language (actually implementing its features). Written by C++''s maker... but heh, I just got off subject. C in 21 days is where I learned where C came from.

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Original post by sakky
I would have never thought C came from UNIX.

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While C''s first home was and is UNIX, saying that C "came from" UNIX is just a wee bit incorrect. C was developed in large part to facilitate the porting of UNIX to different platforms, but primarily for the purpose of providing a powerful language for systems programming. The two emerging technologies (UNIX and C) were simply logical complements (a compact and powerful OS authoring language and a compact and powerful OS written in said language) and thus exploded in popularity together.

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I would like to add a GUI like MAC OS 10 to UNIX. But thats what Applet did any ways. I would like to heavely modify the KERNEL and make my own GUI for UNIX. Why not? It would be fun and eductional.

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True, but you shouldn''t need to modify the kernel to implement a GUI. That''s the core of the UNIX Philosphy (something many people today have forgotten): unifunctional applications (or components) with standard interfaces and interoperability can be assembled in a variety of ways to create powerful constructs. Thus the kernel is completely separate from all usermode processes and only interacts with said processes (and not all directly) via a well-documented set of published interfaces. UNIX rules for precisely this reason.

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My advisor at school gave me some tips on UNIX and were to go to get it.

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Get Linux. Any variant or distribution. The coolness of UNIX with the additional coolness of a huge user/developer community.

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I also found out that UNIX has a built in C compiler. Thats cool.

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That''s not quite correct either. UNIX is virtually always supplied with a compiler, but it''s not "built-in" in the common sense of the term. I''ve put together a Linux system (RedHat 7.1) that didn''t have the compiler installed before, though the compiler was available both on the CDs and on the web. Of course, since so many programs expect and even depend on UNIX always having a compiler installed (and these days they expect GCC on most UNIX variants), the system was somewhat crippled without it.

But yeah, Computer Science does rock - for completely different reasons.

I think I stand corrected. I remeber being told that C was developed parallel with Unix . Basicly its purpose was like you said, systems programming. I'm happy with my discovery none the less.

I checked into some Linux variants and I made up my choice. I will be getting red hat8.0. I'm pretty excited to be getting red hat8.0 Linux. I would like to explore other operating systems, I've heard there mainly Unix / Linux variants. With the exception of older MAC versions.

[edited by - Sakky on October 2, 2002 11:06:02 PM]

C is very cool

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Original post by LessBread
The Windows kernel is written in it too.

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That however, is not cool.

What do I do with rpm or iso files? I found alot of linux and unix downloads but were is the extractor?

RPM is the installation utility developed by Red Hat. You need to run rpm (command-line, not recommended) or one of the many GUI frontends like GnoRPM.

ISOs are meant to be burned to CD and then run (most contain at least one bootable image, which contains the installer).

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Original post by sakky
What do I do with rpm or iso files? I found alot of linux and unix downloads but were is the extractor?

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Don't worry about RPM's until you have a distro (Linux packaged up with the tools to make it useful) installed; they're packages for Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions to help with dependencies (making sure what you're installing doesn't require something you don't have yet).

ISO's are filesystem image files (mainly) for burning to CD-R's. You burn the ISO of a distro and (most often) boot from that CD-ROM to begin installing the distro. If you have data that you want to keep (personal files, or another OS) be careful not to delete or overwrite it while installing.

EDIT: Oluseyi beat me to it .



[edited by - Null and Void on October 3, 2002 3:02:45 AM]

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Original post by Raymondo
The Windows kernel is written in it too...

That however, is not cool.

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I assume you mean that the Windows kernel is uncool and not that it was written in C? Actually what I should have said is that most kernels are written in C - and - Assembler. That would have been more accurate.