[TUHS] Documentation on B language?
Christian Neukirchen
chneukirchen at gmail.com
Wed Mar 9 21:09:58 AEST 2016
John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> writes:
> 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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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.)
My copy of the Algol 68 report says "+:=" and "-:=", so it is
questionable why Ken reversed them, especially since the ambiguity
looks obvious.
> Pre-increment operators were already known in Lisp 1.5 long before;
> they are now spelled incf and decf in Common Lisp.
AFAICS Algol didn't have them, but every Pascal I know had inc and dec.
--
Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen at gmail.com> http://chneukirchen.org
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