Re: history of argv (was: Re: How to do a massive unfill paragraph operation over several hundred files?)

[Emanuel Berg]

Skip Montanaro wrote:

>> BTW I always thought, without thinking about
>> it, that "argv" is a convention in and from
>> the C programming language! But Lisp is
>> older than C (1958 to 1972; Elisp in
>> particular tho a 1985 youngster) so perhaps
>> it is the other way around?
>
> Though Lisp is older than C, it hasn't been
> static that entire time. It's not surprising
> to me that particular implementations would
> adapt to the ecosystems in which they are
> dropped (especially, as with Unix, that
> becomes the largest installed base for
> a couple decades), then pick those
> adaptations up and take them to other
> environments. I suspect that if Multics was
> still the main Emacs ecosystem, we'd see
> Multics-like names at the boundaries.
> In fact, they might be there and I just don't
> recognize them. <wink>

Riiight... so it *is* from C?

Multics was first released in 1969 while work
started at MIT as early as 1965 [1].

The first Unix manual was published in 1971 and
it appeared outside of Bell in 1973.
Work on Unix started in 1969.

The word "Unix" should be a pun/joke on
"Multics", right? Because Multics was supposed
to be multi-user, only wasn't, while Unix,
despite its name, is...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics

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