From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: chneukirchen@gmail.com (Christian Neukirchen) Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2016 12:09:58 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Documentation on B language? In-Reply-To: <20160308180019.GD32247@mercury.ccil.org> (John Cowan's message of "Tue, 8 Mar 2016 13:00:19 -0500") References: <201603081301.u28D1wGP104789@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <20160308180019.GD32247@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <8737rz6h6h.fsf@gmail.com> John Cowan 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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C. 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 http://chneukirchen.org