[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Tue Mar 8 23:01:58 AEST 2016


>> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.html
>> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bintro.html

> Yup, there certainly were different versions of B.

Yes, kbman covers only one of the two implementations that
cohabited the PDP-11. The other was the same language, with
software paging, so it could have a larger data space.

Various aspects of the language were borrowed from PL/I,
BCPL and Algol 68. ++ and -- were novel operators. The
reversal of Algol's assignment operators (e.g. -=
became =-) was eventually repealed in C.

doug
e



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