Joey wrote:
so C really doesnt stand for anything. thats wierd.
I suppose that, since C is a derivative of BCPL[sup]1[/sup] by way of B, one could argue thast it stands for either 'Cambridge' or 'Comprehensive'. But that would be silly...
OTOH, when I was in college and first encountering the language (using DeSmet's C and a Lotus-menu-style text editor better left forgotten) I was told by some wiseacre upperclassman that it stood for 'Cryptic'. To a student whose previous experience was with Applesoft BASIC and Turbo Pascal, and who hadn't quite gotten the different between 'language' and 'programming environment' yet, this seemed entirely plausible.
1.) BCPL stands for "Basic Cambridge Programming Language", a simplified version of CPL, which, like JOVIAL and BLISS, was based on the early ALGOL-58 standard. As the language spread out of Cambridge University, the name was retconned to "Basic Comprehensive Programming Language". Now you know.