Dennis Ritchie

[Mike Wright]

On 10/13/2011 12:42 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 10/13/2011 12:32 PM, Andre Robatino wrote:
>> Andre Robatino<robatino<at>   fedoraproject.org>   writes:
>>
>>> The return value is undefined without the return statement.
>>
>> Although looking at my copy of K&R 2, the early examples don't include the
>> return statement either (it's used later, though).
>>
>
> IIRC, Unix was first designed to run on machines with very limited
> memory.  Assigning a value that wasn't going to be used would have been
> regarded as a waste of resources in those days.

Guaranteed.  Worked at Nat Semi back in the mid 70s and a state of the 
art, 1 bit by 1 k, static, 1 uSec response time, cost 2 bucks.

An old copy of Byte from August, 1980 show an ad for 64KB RAM MEMORIES 
at the low price of only $750.00.  The same issue talks about how 
different groups tried to minimalize object code sizes, and the 
differences they were scrabbling over were measured in bytes.