From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rmswierczek@gmail.com (Robert Swierczek) Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2017 01:40:43 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Non-US Unix Activities In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > (Funny how this conversation makes me feel like one of a few surviving > members of a tribe speaking a soon to be dead language...) I think there is a beautiful simplicity to B code as a high level assembler or universal machine language. The lack of types is closer to the machine since a CPU generally does not enforce types on memory or register cells. Adding types to B (to create C) was an excellent design choice, however another choice would have been to keep it type-less. Operator forms would explicitly encode the appropriate type (such as unsigned right shift >>> in Java, or floating point add #+ in BCPL.) Pointer dereference and increment symbols would also need size annotation (perhaps char and word forms would suffice.) It is interesting to ponder such a language as a universal target for higher level language compilers, or as a specialized language for OS and device driver development.

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