from the July 1985 issue of Unix World magazine

by David Spencer

Current third-generation languages such as C and FORTRAN will have to move aside at some point for a new family of fourth-generation languages.

At 30 years old, FORTRAN is graying at the temples; third-generation programming languages are in their heyday. So you are probably wondering how we will speak to computers during the next decade. If current projections hold true, computers will seem (and talk) more like us fairly soon. In order for that to happen, however, current third-generation computer languages (such as C and fortran) will have to move aside for a new family of fourth-generation languages.

from the June 1985 issue of Computer Language magazine

By Craig LaGrow

He calls himself a programmer at heart. But as an accomplished science fiction writer, president of a successful software company, technical book author, musician, and runner, P.J. Plauger is certainly a man of many talents.

His friends and work associates know him as Bill — a name he was affectionately given by his older sister three days after his birth. But in any published, professional work, he prefers to use the initials of his real name, Phillip James.

by Bill Tuthill

from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine

C is descended from B, which was descended from BCPL. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards. B was an interpretive language written in 1970 by Ken Thompson (1) after he abandoned a Fortran implementation for the PDP-7.

BCPL and B were typeless languages, which may account for the type permissiveness of C. They restricted their scope to machine words and were rather low level. However, they provided structured programming constructs similar to those in Algol. BCPL, B, and C all provide pointers and address arithmetic. All three pass function parameters by value, rather than by address, but permit passing by address if desired.