The popularity of C had absolutely nothing to do with DOS. The most popular languages on early PCs were BASIC and Pascal. The popularity of C is linked to UNIX, from where it was brought to DOS. The far/near pointers did not play especially well with C view of pointers as integers of some fixed size. The 32-bit flat memory model made C programming somewhat closer to what it used to be in UNIX.
> The popularity of C had absolutely nothing to do with DOS.
You might want to read popular programming magazines from the early 80s, and the attention given to C on DOS. (It was enormous.) At one time, I counted 30 C compilers available for DOS. What other platform came remotely close to that?
> The most popular languages on early PCs were BASIC and Pascal.
BASIC was indeed popular, but generally not for professional programming. Pascal had nowhere near the penetration of C in the early days (1982, 1983, etc.). Microsoft Pascal 1.0 was unusable, the top C compiler was Lattice C.
> The popularity of C is linked to UNIX, from where it was brought to DOS.
Unix was nowhere remotely as popular as DOS.
> The far/near pointers did not play especially well with C view of pointers as integers of some fixed size.
As a DOS C compiler writer, I can attest that near/far mapped very well onto C semantics. The C Standard in 1989 was very careful to not upset that.
> The 32-bit flat memory model made C programming somewhat closer to what it used to be in UNIX.
That was much later. But since you brought it up (!), 32 bit DOS extenders were in wide use on DOS, and were programmed with C. I don't recall Pascal ever existing on them, but perhaps I misremember. C was also popular on the 16 bit DOS extenders, I don't remember Pascal on those, either.
