From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 13:00:19 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Documentation on B language?
In-Reply-To: <201603081301.u28D1wGP104789@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
References: <201603081301.u28D1wGP104789@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
Message-ID: <20160308180019.GD32247@mercury.ccil.org>

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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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.)
Pre-increment operators were already known in Lisp 1.5 long before;
they are now spelled incf and decf in Common Lisp.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.  --Hal Abelson