{C++}, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor
should
be named `D' or `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs
after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and
microcomputer applications programming. See also {languages of
choice}, {indent style}.

C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain
varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines
all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the
readability and maintainability of assembly language".

:C Programmer's Disease: /n./ The tendency of the undisciplined
C programmer to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits
on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header
files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic storage
allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements
into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he
or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as
70, to allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the
programmer the comfortable feeling of having made the effort to
satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the
user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences
of {fandango on core}. In severe cases of the disease, the
programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only
to further disgruntle the user.

:C++: /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ /n./ Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup
of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to {C}. Now one of the
{languages of choice}, although many hackers still grumble that