For the last couple of months, it's been busy around here, real busy in fact. Between getting out the regular issue and the Macintosh special issue (which you should have in your hands by now if you ordered it) and attending any number of important conferences (such as OOPSLA), it generally seems that there aren't enough hours in a day, days in a week, or bits in a byte.
On top of everything, we've been working on a second special issue that I think really is special -- Dr. Dobb's C Sourcebook for the 1990's. In this C sourcebook, we'll be looking at the direction C will take over the coming years while -- in the same issue -- providing the kind of practical C tools and utilities that you can use today.
What's in the C special issue? For starters, Al Stevens, our C columnist, made the pilgrimage to AT&T Bell Labs where he talked first with Dennis Ritchie, then with Bjarne Stroustrup about C and C++, respectively. They discussed how and why C has evolved, and where the languages will be going in the future.
The interviews aren't Al's only contribution to the issue, however. He also contributed "A C Programmer's Guide to C++," one of several C++ related articles, all of which cover the recently released C++ 2.0 specification. In yet another article, Narain Gehani and Bill Roome, architects of Concurrent C (and authors of an article in the issue of DDJ you're reading right now), discuss discrete event simulation and Concurrent C.
Even though the articles alluded to above are generally forward-looking, we aren't neglecting the tools C programmers need now. To begin with, we revisited one of the more popular C articles we've run in recent years: Stewart Nutter's "Automatic Module Control In C" (August 1988). In this latest incarnation, Stewart's program is a launching pad for Ron Winter, who uses his version to maintain nearly 100,000 lines of code. Other bread-and-butter articles in the issue include Paul Anderson's piece on customized memory allocators, a feature on debugging the stack in C, the source code for a general-purpose list manager, and more. In total, over 4000 lines of C source code are listed in the magazine, all of which are available from the DDJ Forum on CompuServe, the DDJ listing service, or on disk.
When will the C special issue be available? At the same time as our regular January issue, which translates to around the first or second week in December.
How do you get your copy of the C Sourcebook? Here's the best part: We're bundling it with the January issue, so if you're a subscriber, you'll get it free. Two magazines -- the regular and the special -- for the price of one. For those who usually get DDJ off the newsstand, the special issue will also be available on newsstands or it can be ordered directly.
In his interviews with Dennis and Bjarne, Al records some of the history of why C and C++ have evolved the way they have. It's easy to forget that a technology as young as computing has a history, but it does, and that history should be documented. Although our mission isn't to provide a narrative of the computing industry, doing so is a natural outgrowth of our goal (that is, to serve as a communication medium for the exchange of ideas and information among serious programmers).
Stop and think about it. Fortran has been around for 30 or so years, Cobol about the same. This year is the 25th anniversary of Basic. Gary Kildall wrote PL/1 nearly 20 years ago. C was designed about the same time (and B, C's predecessor, was created 10 years before that). Pascal, Modula-2, Forth, and a host of other languages have come on the scene since then. 1990 will be DDJ's 15th year. Tiny Basic, Small C, Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Fifteen years is a long time, and a lot of history has passed between our covers in the meantime. Dr. Dobb's C Sourcebook continues this tradition.
I'll close by mentioning that Mike Swaine recently told me he and Paul Freiberger, his coauthor for Fire In the Valley, the wonderful history of PCs published in 1984, have approached their publisher about updating the book. Here's my two cents worth to the publisher: Do it. A lot has happened over the past four or five years that needs to be chronicled. I'll buy a copy of the second edition, and I'll bet that a lot of others will to .
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's JournalAnd Now for the History Lesson