20 Mar
2013
20 Mar
'13
6:53 p.m.
Cory
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
I'm used to either Unices that don't differentiate that way, or predate C++. ;)
I really don't think it could pre-date C++ as the cc vs CC convention was
Bjarne's, he's the author he got to create the convention! Since all of the
early UNIX flavors of C++ were based on his compiler, they all followed it. His
original "compiler" was a pre-processor (i.e. C++ to C translator) for the
Ritchie and later Johnson C Compiler and for a very long time, C++ was just sold to people
as a better C since it called C under the covers. [I once had the sources, but that stuff
is long off line. I do still have a copy of his original "C with Classes"
paper with an official bell labs cover - that paper actually predates C++ ;-)
It's also why the original suffix for C++ was a the capital letter C, not c++ or cpp
as we often see today.
IIRC Masscomp was the first to realized we needed to integrate it into the other dev
tools, I remember debugging C++ source code being tedious with Masscomp's version of
Mark Linton's dbx debugger (dbx was the godfather to gdb). Being ex-DEC (ex-VMS,
RT11, and RSX), the compiler guys knew it compete we had to have our own compiler (Sun was
late into the compiler biz - about 2-3 yrs after Masscomp BTW).
Since we had started with Bjarne's pre-processor for C++, when they did a new formal
front-end for the compiler DEC style, Masscomp just replaced the CC preprocessor stuff,
with a call to then new compiler, be the name was keep to not break customer's
makefiles. Most other UNIX vendors, like Sun would follow suite.
The g++ convention came from rms and the gnu guys, who always tended to so things there
own way. Plus Redmond did their own thing as they always do, plus they had to deal with
the case folding silliness which they took as a feature not a bug caused by the ASR33 in
the old days. Since in the end, GNU and Redmond created more C++ programmers, there
conventions stuck.
Clem