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What do you think made C such an amazing language compared to say Pascal and Fortrant?

I like C and how it handles pointers and arrays but was it really such a departure from what was available then?

I'm not dissing Pascal or Fortran. But C was tied to UNIX (and a toolchain such as lex/yacc) in a way that allowed UNIX to be quickly and cheaply ported which made it revolutionary. Fortran and Pascal lacked similar infrastructure (eventually there was Oberon which was kind of like the Lisp or Smalltalk stacks but never took off).

Lisp and Smalltalk would be the comparables, but Lisp was not portable the way C is and Smalltalk was very slow.

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