wow, that claim makes me feel old. i've lost track of how many existing/legacy ways we have to write once, deploy anywhere, multi-platform apps. it's like what they say about the great thing about universal ultimate standards: there are so many to choose from!
Indeed, this was the promise of C, and it was largely realized: there are C compilers for almost every platform. (You can even use Emscripten to "compile" C to JavaScript, but don't expect miracles.)
I think there was no promise of C. There were two guys that needed somewhat portable compiler to avoid tying them to one system for their ubiquitous by now operating system.
Kernighan, Richie, UNIX and C.
Or to take more lighthearted - If there really was promise, there would've not been need for a preprocessor.
That's right, And even putting aside the preprocessor, prior to C89, C was a mess portability-wise. (Actually, even after C89, portability was still frustrated by the problem of the varying size of ints.) Ritchie designed C to get above the assembly level so that portability would be possible. But it was certainly not attained until much later.
wow, that claim makes me feel old. i've lost track of how many existing/legacy ways we have to write once, deploy anywhere, multi-platform apps. it's like what they say about the great thing about universal ultimate standards: there are so many to choose from!