[SeekAndFind]

RE: Why didn’t Bell Labs get sued for plagiarizing C?

I thought the C Programming language originated from Bell Labs ...

If memory serves me right, C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson’s B programming language.

Another Bell Labs employee, Brian Kernighan, had written the first C tutorial, and he persuaded Ritchie to coauthor a book on the language. Kernighan would write most of the book’s “expository” material, and Ritchie’s reference manual became its appendices.

I still have the classic that they wrote sitting on my shelf : The C Programming Language

[ConservativeInPA]

I thought the C Programming language originated from Bell Labs ...

Yeah, I think you are correct. I was thinking K&R and pushed the post button. Then it dawned on me K&R worked at Bell Labs.

[Bikkuri]

"I thought the C Programming language originated from Bell Labs ..."

That's the way I learned it..

[Myrddin]

My own original "The C Programming Language" is on my shelf at home. I really wanted to get an updated copy autographed by Dennis Ritchie, but I didn't have one in hand at the same time I had an opportunity to ask Dennis for an autograph. C'est la vie. It was enough to meet him in person at UseNIX.

I became a real C++ grammar "nazi" in the early 80s with copies of Harbison and Steele book. It was very helpful as wave after wave of GCC arrived from the effort of Richard Stallman. GCC was more strict than the standard C compiler delivered with my UNIX operating systems. It really helped expose defects. Converting traditional K&R C to fully prototyped ANSI style C was a huge win in stomping bugs.

I had one contract with 300,000 lines of awful K&R C. Round one was conversion to full ANSI style prototyped function signatures. I acquired a licensed copy of "flexelint" to run against the code base. Again, huge exposures of trashy coding practices include use of uninitialized variables. Unit testing was achieved to the point of testing 93% of every line of code as tested by the HP basis branch analyzer. Purify was used to expose use of uninitialized variables at runtime. Freeing "freed" memory. Using "freed" memory. Array bounds read/write defects. All of it squashed. On return of the code to the customer, they confirmed 100 known defects were cleared. Defects that had not been disclosed to me at the start of the clean up. It all boiled down to defects from sloppy coding and failure to test.

I haven't been writing C++ in the past few years. When I do, I like to use "cppcheck" for semantic, static code analysis and valgrind for runtime checking. Both are open source tools with similarity to flexelint and Purify.

[Boogieman]

“If memory serves me right, C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson’s B programming language.”

Seems like we are well past due for the release of D. What’s the hold up?