5 ms·
I think it was BCPL then B then C. That is why there was a nerd joke that the follower language to C should be P, not C++
by whitten 4y ago
I think it was BCPL then B then C.
That is why there was a nerd joke that the follower language to C should be P, not C++
- pizlonator 4y agoFirst Unix was written in asm. Then Ken came up with B to write some userland stuff more easily. B was not portable. B was a BCPL-like, but smaller and simpler. Then Dennis came up with C. C was just portable B (it added types for the purpose of getting around the fact that word sizes differed between archs). And then the B code was recompiled with C and modified as needed. Though C is back-compatible to B somewhat (hence why C has the thing where no type implies int).
- pjmlp 4y agoBCPL is actually the abbreviation of Bootstrapping CPL. Originally BCPL wasn't going to be used for anything beyond bootstraping the CPL compiler, eventually it took a life of its own. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language) There is some irony that for UNIX workloads we are stuck with the evolution of a language whose main purpose was only to bootstrap a compiler and be done with it.