[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

Andru Luvisi luvisi at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 05:10:39 AEST 2016


How were they spelled in Lisp 1.5? The manual lists add1 and sub1, but says
nothing about them modifying the value of a variable.

Sent from my phone.  Please excuse my brevity.
On Mar 8, 2016 10:20 AM, "John Cowan" <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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