Rest in peace, Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie, who created the C language, has died. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of his work — C is imperfect and limited, but it serves as a near-universal tool for programming everything from tiny ATTiny8s to Blue Gene supercomputers. It does exactly what it was designed to do — provide a portable abstraction that is nevertheless close enough to the underlying machine to be efficient, and comfortable enough to write substantial programs in. These days, I (and many other programmers) prefer to write in Python or another high-level language, but most interpreted languages are still implemented in C, and when performance is critical, C is generally the way to go. Dennis Ritchie's impact on the world of computers was tremendous, and he will be sorely missed.

From: Dennis Ritchie 
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Computing sizeof() during compilation
Organization: Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies

> You are right.  It was nice back in the days when things like
> 
> #if (sizeof(int) == 8)
> 
> actually worked (on some compilers).

Must have been before my time.

 Dennis