From: brantleycoile@me.com (Brantley Coile)
Subject: [TUHS] Documentation on B language?
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2016 06:29:28 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <C35ACC3D-BA7D-488C-B80D-FA7465EC65EF@me.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8737rz6h6h.fsf@gmail.com>
Note that the novelty isn't that it adds or subtracts one with storage, but that it can be used in a more complex expression, along with a pre- and post-evaluation semantics.
Also, Pascal post dates B.
I offer this just as a clarification of the facts. I greatly admire both the languages of Thompson and Ritchie and those of Prof Wirth. I write a good bit of C code but all things being equal I would be programming in Oberon. But B's ++ and -- operators seem to be unique.
Sent from my iPad
> On Mar 9, 2016, at 6:09 AM, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 operators (e.g. -= became =-) was eventually repealed in C.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
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-03-09 11:29 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-03-08 13:01 Doug McIlroy
2016-03-08 18:00 ` John Cowan
2016-03-08 19:10 ` Andru Luvisi
2016-03-08 19:43 ` John Cowan
2016-03-08 23:13 ` Tim Bradshaw
2016-03-09 11:09 ` Christian Neukirchen
2016-03-09 11:29 ` Brantley Coile [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2016-03-09 21:34 Doug McIlroy
2016-03-09 21:43 ` John Cowan
2016-03-10 18:09 ` scj
2016-03-09 12:34 Noel Chiappa
2016-03-07 0:57 Norman Wilson
2016-03-07 8:39 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2016-03-07 0:20 Warren Toomey
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