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@collectifission @bughuntercat Os we didn’t have C, Pascal derivatives would have taken the same place and, I suspect, the world would be a marginally better place. Later Pascal dialects fixed a lot of things that Kernighan complained about in Why Pascal is not my Favourite Language and a lot of additional things that were not fixed in C.

The original Mac operating system was written in Pascal, not C, and Win16 was designed to support both C and Pascal as first-class languages. The Burroughs Large Systems machines used (garbage collected!) Algol to write the OS.

UNIX was influential, but it’s not always been for positive reasons. A lot of the things that made modern systems so insecure would have been impossible on MULTICS, but UNIX threw the, away and they were not reintroduced even when UNIX derivatives were running on machines orders of magnitude more powerful than those for which MULTICS was designed.