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* [[Wikipedia:B (programming language)|Wikipedia article]] | * [[Wikipedia:B (programming language)|Wikipedia article]] | ||
* [http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/b Man page from Unix 1st Edition] | * [http://man.cat-v.org/unix-1st/1/b Man page from Unix 1st Edition] | ||
| − | * [ | + | * [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.html User's Reference to B] |
| − | * [ | + | * [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bintro.html Some documents about B] |
Latest revision as of 23:57, 4 March 2017
Ken Thompson worked with BCPL on the Multics project, so when he started working on a new operating system called Unix, he was inspired by that language in creating his own new programming language for use in that project, which he called B (apparently after the first letter of the predecessor language). While BCPL was already designed to be efficient in resource use, Thompson slimmed down B even more, so it would work in the very low-resource small computers he was targeting. B had only one data type, the 'word', which could represent a number or an ASCII character.
The syntax was greatly changed from BCPL, and includes much that would look at least vaguely familiar to modern programmers used to C and its descendants. As B was revised and expanded during the development of Unix, eventually it had acquired sufficient new functionality to deserve a new name, and this is when C was born.
