Talk:B (programming language)

message: Is it really NPOV to say that B "probably should have died" but "survived because [some] poor deprived (and depraved) systems didn't have anything better"?  I've never used B, but I kind of like typeless languages like FORTH.  (I find the Lions book Unix kernel code more readable that much modern C largely because of the aBsence of type annotations in the code.) -- Kragen
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Not completely NPOV :-) But B is a real pain to implement and use on most modern computers. Its whole notion of "address" and "word" just doesn't match modern hardware. (I have "writing a B compiler for 386" on my list of "silly projects to do sometime", so i have given these issues some thought.)
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It's neither NPOV nor accurate, based on my four years programming with it on a dual CPU Honeywell 66/60 mainframe in the 1981-85 period, working with the Mollusc CLI. C is definitely better but not that much better. B had all of the core concepts required for systems programming in that environment, though it definitely lacked some C refinements I appreciate. I didn't have any significant character type issues using it with 9 bit bytes and 36 bit machine words. Was certainly way better than doing systems programming in FORTRAN...:) The greater impediment on that system was the line editor, which taught me regular expressions very well but was a real pain to use for editing. The line editor was the best editor available on the system. I've read a rather better history of the evolution of the language and I'll update the article a bit more after doing the necessary research to find it again.JamesDay 20:12, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Just did that and added links to the sources. JamesDay 19:25, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I would so like to comprehend this article. A general encyclopedia is meant to enlighten and explain but I am afraid this is well beyond me. 
B programming language is not best-known to me. What did BCPL have that is now stripped away to become language B and that Ken Thompson felt he could do without? Is there a lesser-known language that might have equally been of use? What are GCOS that are being run by Honeywell 36 bit mainframes? 
These are only a few questions that might be asked by someone uninitiated in the finer arts of computer-speak. You might start like: “B programming language was a transitional phase between BCPL and C. BCPL consisted of …. but was felt to be redundant by … Ken Thompson…. because …”, etc. Who was Ken Thompson, anyway? 
The article as it stands is next to useless because there are so many things unexplained. Dieter Simon 01:16, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: A non-specialist&rsquo;s complaint

message: The article says:
:The typeless nature of B made sense on the Honeywell, PDP-7 and many older computers, but was a problem on the PDP-11 because it was difficult to elegantly access the character data type that the PDP-11 and most modern computers fully support.
What does the "character data type" refer to? (Just some notion of a single byte type that allows 7-bit ASCII plus extensions to be represented, or something more complex?) I think it would be worth elaborting on what this feature is and why it wasn't convenient to use with B. Neilc 10:32, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Character data type"? 

message: Dan Gookin claims in "C For Dummies Volume One" (in the antiquitated version that I have) that B stood for Bell Labs. Is that not correct? --86.143.157.188 16:03, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Dennis Ritchie (who worked with Thompson on B) doesn't think so. He claims that it is a contraction of BCPL. -- Derek Ross | Talk 06:53, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Source of name "B"? 

message: "Ken Thompson wrote B basing it mainly on the BCPL language he had used to write Unix while in the Multics project."
I think we need to lose the "to write Unix". Then the sentence makes sense and is in agreement with B history as remembered by Dennis Ritchie. 198.142.19.55 (talk) 16:13, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. Dennis Ritchie's <The Development of the C Language> , states that, "While wanting to use a higher-level language, he [Thompson] wrote the original Unix system in PDP-7 assembler." This is not consistent with the information on this page. Therefore I think changing the sentence to, "Ken Thompson wrote B basing it mainly on the BCPL language he had used in the Multics project.", is justifiable.  ctype.h 18:09, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weird stuff in History section. 

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thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion