[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Wed Mar 9 04:00:19 AEST 2016


Doug McIlroy scripsit:

> 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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.

Algol 68, like Algol 60 and Pascal, used := (pronounced "becomes") for
assignment, and the Algol 68 assignment operators were spelled :+=,
:-=, etc. (pronounced "plus and becomes", "minus and becomes", etc.)
Pre-increment operators were already known in Lisp 1.5 long before;
they are now spelled incf and decf in Common Lisp.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.  --Hal Abelson



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