[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

[Brantley Coile]

Note that the novelty isn't that it adds or subtracts one with storage, but that it can be used in a more complex expression, along with a pre- and post-evaluation semantics. 

Also, Pascal post dates B. 

I offer this just as a clarification of the facts. I greatly admire both the languages of Thompson and Ritchie and those of Prof Wirth. I write a good bit of C code but all things being equal I would be programming in Oberon. But B's ++ and -- operators seem to be unique. 

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> On Mar 9, 2016, at 6:09 AM, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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