From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2021 18:12:03 -0500 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20211128231203.3BCB818C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (raw)
> The ++ operator appears to have been.
One would expect that most people on this list would have read "The
Development of the C Language", by Dennis Ritchie, which makes perfectly clear
(at 'More History') that the PDP-11 had nothing to do with it:
Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which
increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether
the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They
were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People
often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and
auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix
first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no
PDP-11 when B was developed.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
thereby alleviating the need for Ken to chime in (although they do allow a
very efficient implementation of it).
Too much to hope for, I guess.
Noel
next reply other threads:[~2021-11-28 23:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-28 23:12 Noel Chiappa [this message]
2021-11-28 23:35 ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-29 1:53 ` John Cowan
2021-11-29 13:48 ` Dan Halbert
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-11-28 20:26 Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:07 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-28 21:15 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:31 ` Ken Thompson
2021-11-28 21:47 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 22:17 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-29 0:19 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-29 1:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 2:23 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-30 19:27 ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-12-01 8:46 ` Rich Morin
2021-12-01 12:28 ` Al Kossow
2021-11-30 3:18 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 1:18 ` George Michaelson
2021-11-29 1:36 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-29 1:47 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-29 7:46 ` arnold
2021-11-29 7:52 ` arnold
2021-11-29 14:44 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 12:11 ` Michael Kjörling
2021-11-28 21:23 ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-28 21:39 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-11-28 22:41 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-28 21:40 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 15:37 ` Phil Budne
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