[TUHS] Documentation on B language?

[chneukirchen@gmail.com (Christian Neukirchen)]

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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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