[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

Tim Bradshaw tfb at tfeb.org
Wed Mar 9 09:13:42 AEST 2016


> On 8 Mar 2016, at 19:43, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> 
> They may not have been in the very earliest 1.5, but rather in one of the
> many 1.5 and 1.6 offshoots (which are documented mostly, if at all,
> in unsearchable PDFs), probably spelled inc and dec.

I am reasonably sure that they weren't in MACLISP (SETF is there) and fairly sure also they were not in InterLisp.  They do appear in Lisp Machine Lisp, so I would suspect that this was how they found their way into CL.

However as soon as macros appeared (sometime shortly after Lisp 1.5 I think) things like this become so easy to implement (in the usual cases at least: fully-fledged ones are harder until SETF and its machinery exists, although that itself can be implemented with macrology) that probably they appeared many times in programs informally before this without anyone bothering to document them.

--tim


More information about the TUHS mailing list