Talk:B (programming language)
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
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.)
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)
- Just did that and added links to the sources. JamesDay 19:25, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
A non-specialist’s complaint
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)