Many, many eons ago, in the early '90's, there was an implementation of B for Linux ( I believe it was written in C, ironically enough ). I think it was part of a bigger collection of "ancient" software for Linux that use to be around in the early Slackware days. Alas, I have searched for it in the recent past, as I was thinking about porting it to OS X for kicks, but it seems to have vanished. Having an B, implemented in a modern language for a modern OS would be cool. - Derrik On Oct 14, 2011, at 10:52 AM, "A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Oct 14, 2011, at 11:53 AM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote: It would have been around '92 or '93, back when Slackware really only provided a very basic boot system, gcc, some fancy scripts, and a crap load of tarballs to compile everything. I'm not even sure it was part of the Slackware collection, it might have been something someone added to the server - I didn't build that computer. It was an experimental system at CSU, where I was going to school at the time - and the first actually Linux computer I ever had an account on. One of the older professors had a bunch of B code he got from someplace and put the compiler on there to see if he could get it to build. I remember he also put f2c on there too as he had a tape full of Fortran code he wanted to compile. But, for all I know, he may have written the B compiler himself, but I seem to remember him telling me about this collection of ancient software for Linux that someone else had written, and he had gotten it up and running on the experimental Linux system. Just not sure how faulty my memory is. I just remember looking at B, and asking why he just doesn't covert it to C? Funny thing was, some of the younger professors were complaining saying the preferred their "REAL UNIX". Unfortunately, he as long since retired. And that Computer was retired when they moved the main Student system from HPUX to Redhat in the late '90's. - Derrik

I saw that the 4.3BSD distribution of the User Contributed Software contained the B progamming language & environment from Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam. It is "the Mark1C implementation of B for Unix(c) systems." But now I see that is not the same B: B is a simple but powerful new programming language, designed for use in personal computing. (Note: the name ``B'' is only a temporary working title, and the new language bears no relation to the predecessor of C.)

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:52 AM, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote: What intrigued me about this is that it's such an early example of an abstract machine running as an interpreter. BCPL, roughly contemporaneous, used ocode as an intermediate language, but it seems this was intended to be further translated into assembly. While it's possible to interpret ocode, in practice it seems this was rare, if it was done at all. Almost everything I've read about abstract/vitual machines traces its roots back to the following source: James R. Bell. 1973. Threaded code. Commun. ACM 16, 6 (June 1973), 370-372. DOI=10.1145/362248.362270 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/362248.362270 Here's where dmr mentions implementing B using this technique: The B compiler on the PDP-7 did not generate machine instructions, but instead `threaded code' [Bell 72], an interpretive scheme in which the compiler's output consists of a sequence of addresses of code fragments that perform the elementary operations. The operations typically—in particular for B—act on a simple stack machine. Note he says it was published in 1972, when it actually appeared in print in 1973 (same page numbers). Two paragraphs later he writes: By 1970, the Unix project had shown enough promise that we were able to acquire the new DEC PDP-11. The processor was among the first of its line delivered by DEC, and three months passed before its disk arrived. Making B programs run on it using the threaded technique required only writing the code fragments for the operators, and a simple assembler which I coded in B; ; soon, dc became the first interesting program to be tested, before any operating system, on our PDP-11. Almost as rapidly, still waiting for the disk, Thompson recoded the Unix kernel and some basic commands in PDP-11 assembly language. Of the 24K bytes of memory on the machine, the earliest PDP-11 Unix system used 12K bytes for the operating system, a tiny space for user programs, and the remainder as a RAM disk. This version was only for testing, not for real work; the machine marked time by enumerating closed knight's tours on chess boards of various sizes. Once its disk appeared, we quickly migrated to it after transliterating assembly-language commands to the PDP-11 dialect, and porting those already in B. The abstract machine is also mentioned in Thompson's "Users' Reference to B", dated January 7, 1972. If the 1970 date is correct, they were using this technique some three years before most of the computing world knew about it!?

On Friday, 14 October 2011 at 9:52:21 -0500, A. P. Garcia wrote: This paper is interesting not only for the evolution of C, but also for the evolution of Unix. I've learnt a lot. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Michael Davidson <michael_davidson(a)pacbell.net> wrote: Hello! I just ran a Google search (naturally) using the term BCPL, and found an interesting set of pages. The Wikipedia page on it contains some darned interesting things. Take for example the TX0 and TX1 computers. The PDP-1 descends from one of them. The first MUD was written using BCPL, which I suspect would be right down a certain correspondent's alley. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."