B (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:09, 9 November 2012

Revision as of 18:07, 9 November 2012

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==History==

Ken Thompson wrote B basing it mainly on the [[BCPL]] language he had used to write [[Unix]] while in the [[Multics]] project. B was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component that Thompson felt he could do without, in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time. The language also included some changes made to suit Thompson's preferences (mostly along the lines of reducing the number of non-whitespace characters in a typical program).{{Citation needed|date=August 2011}}

Like BCPL and [[Forth (programming language)|FORTH]], B had only one datatype: the computer word. Most operators (e.g., +, -, *, /) treated this as an integer, but others treated it as a memory address to be [[Reference (computer science)|dereferenced]]. In many other ways it looked a lot like an early version of C. A few library functions existed, including some that vaguely resemble functions from the [[stdio.h|standard I/O library]] in C.