Python for everything?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-06-30, Ivan Van Laningham <ivanlan at pauahtun.org> wrote:

>> As other have noted, C was never really used for everything. Unix
>> tools were designed to connect together from the very beginning, which
>> is what makes shell scripting so powerful. This was true before there
>> was a C. Likewise, some things you need more control over the machine
>> than you get in C - those are still done in assembler. These days, C
>> compilers let you embed assembler statements in your C, so some of
>> these things are done in such variants.
>
> It really was used "for everything";

I think there are two intepretations of C being "used for
everthing".  

My reading of that phrase is that nothing else was used: there
were no shell scripts, no awk scripts, no FORTRAN programs, no
JCL, no COBOL, no Lisp, no sed.

That just was never the case.  There never was a C-language
monoculture in any OS.

Another possible interpretation is that at some point in the
past, there was some misguided soul who has tried to use C for
every type of task imaginable.  That's probably true, but the
same could be said of any language.

-- 
Grant Edwards