except all those written before it?

I program on a mid range system. If I want to write in C for it I could but I have no reason too. I use two languages that appeared well before C and produce very effective and near bullet proof code because of it.

There are some big names in the language world that were here before C and some probably had influence on that language.

While I would not mind refreshing my C, having not had any use for it since 85, I am not even sure where to start.

> except all those written before it?

Out of curiosity, what do you use? My history is not too great, but I can't think of many languages that came before C that are still in use today. I actually use fortran at work (along with C), and I'll give a pass to Lisp (it seems like c predates the dialects that are still in common use, ie common lisp and scheme), but it seems like most others (Pascal, COBOL, Basic) are more curiosities in the modern world. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually Cobol is pretty much everywhere in the substrate, but not in visible places... banks, insurance companies, and the like have tons of cobol code in use.

And if we count VBA, VB6 and VB.net as spiritual successors to BASIC there's an absolutely ungodly amount of new BASIC code in use and being written every day anywhere people use Excel. It's ugly, but it's a large part of how business is done.

Add Lua to your C tools collection. Put Lua where the sun don't shine, and experience a bright new C appreciation.

This is a big one. I only really felt comfortable in OCaml when I knew that I could write a binding to any library I would ever need via C.