B (programming language): Difference between revisions

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'''B''' is a [[programming language]] developed at [[Bell Labs]] circa 1969 by [[Ken Thompson (computer programmer)|Ken Thompson]] and [[Dennis Ritchie]].

B was derived from [[BCPL]], and its name may possibly be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multis[[Multics]].{{refn|group=note|"Its name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after [[Bon|a religion]] whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas."<ref name="chist">{{cite journal| first = Dennis M.| last = Ritchie| author-link = Dennis Ritchie| title = The Development of the C Language| date=March 1993 | journal = ACM SIGPLAN Notices| volume = 28 | issue = 3| pages = 201–208| url = http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html| doi = 10.1145/155360.155580}}</ref>}}

B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software.<ref name=bur>{{cite web

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}}</ref> It was a typeless language, with the only data type being the underlying machine's natural [[memory word]] format, whatever that might be. Depending on the context, the word was treated either as an [[integer]] or a [[memory address]].

As machines with [[ASCII]] processing became common, notably the [[DEC PDP-11]] that arrived at Bell, support for character data stuffed in memory words became important. The typeless nature of the language was seen as a disadvantage, which led Thompson and Ritchie to develop an expanded version of the language supporting new internal and user-defined types, which became the [[C programming language]].

== History ==