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i typed dc on my mac (13.2.1, ventura) and it showed me a prompt: >>>

whose bright idea was it to give dc a prompt?! i have to run dc -P or set an env variable to get rid of it.

literally unusable!

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@DavidB no, it happens when you open a terminal window and type dc.

@DavidB yes, but that’s not the point. all other versions of dc do not display a prompt. dc predates the c language.

@DavidB cunningham’s law?

unix was originally written in assembly. see https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Thompson was faced with a hardware environment cramped and spartan even for the time: the DEC PDP-7 on which he started in 1968 was a machine with 8K 18-bit words of memory and no software useful to him. While wanting to use a higher-level language, he wrote the original Unix system in PDP-7 assembler. At the start, he did not even program on the PDP-7 itself, but instead used a set of macros for the GEMAP assembler on a GE-635 machine. A postprocessor generated a paper tape readable by the PDP-7.

[…]

By early 1973, the essentials of modern C were complete. The language and compiler were strong enough to permit us to rewrite the Unix kernel for the PDP-11 in C during the summer of that year. (Thompson had made a brief attempt to produce a system coded in an early version of C—before structures—in 1972, but gave up the effort.)