On: Niklaus Wirth has died

[dragonwriter]

The industry picked C when Pascal was still widely supported, not as a result of it being abandoned.

[pjmlp → dragonwriter]

A side effect of UNIX adoption, C already being in the box, whereas anything else would cost money, and no famous dialect (Object Pascal, VMS Pascal, Solaris Pascal, UCSD Pascal) being portable.

Unfortunately Pascal only mattered to legions of Mac and PC developers.

[musicale → dragonwriter]

Picking C == abandoning Pascal (which had been commonly used for Mac and PC development.)