If C was made a decade later, we&#x27;d have been using Pascal or BCPL or something. Other stuff could do the job. Example: Hansen later put a Pascal variant, Edison, on the same machine thst was simpler, safer, and faster to compile. Pascal itself was ported to 70+ architectures from mainframes to 8-bitters.<p>Nah, we didn&#x27;t need C. Thompson just really liked BCPL. It was crap. So they tweaked it into C. It <i>still</i> couldn&#x27;t write UNIX. Ritchie added structs and that version finally did the job. All in the papers I cited. It&#x27;s facts in their own writings and predecessor papers (eg BCPL) why each decision was made.