Do C library functions generally mimic the Intel assembly language style?

Question

I'm looking at the basic strcpy function. It is

char *strcpy( char *dest, const char *src );

Which reminds me of assembly language: MOV DEST, SRC

• James Anderson: You just need to ask yourself which came first C or Intel *86 chips. Or put it another way processors exist to run programs on, any new processor is going to attempt to efficiently support all features of an existing popular language.
• Caffeinated: @James - That's a very good point; Thank You So Much!
• user: strcpy(dest, src) or dest = src. No, in C, these don't accomplish the exact same thing, but the general pattern (destination before source) is the same in both. If C had used a syntax like TI-BASIC's value → variable (source before destination) for assignment, maybe it would have been strcpy(src, dest) too.
• David Thornley: @James Anderson: The Intel 8008 was released in 1972, and that set the tone for the Intel processors to follow (8080, 8085, 8086 and beyond), and that's about the time C was released. Looks like independent development to me.
• James Anderson: @David -- but Cs predecessors such as BCPL had already been around for a while. Besides nearly every contemporary instruction set (PDP-11, IBM 360, Unisys, Burroughs etc.) implemented a block move instruction.

Answer 1

The Intel processors were not yet invented when the C library was designed, so no.

Your observation that C is similar to assembly language is correct, however. C was designed to replace assembly when Unix needed to be ported to other architectures than the original PDP-11 and many constructs map directly to the PDP-11 machine language.

I do not know if the machine language of the PDP-11 was similar to Intel (dest, src) or the reason for the API convention was just that it was this way that made most sense to the designer.

See http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html for time line.

• Jerry Coffin: Yes, at least with the usual DEC assemblers (e.g., Macro-11), you'd also use mov dst, src.