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Challenged by McIlroy's feat in reproducing TMG, Thompson decided that Unix—possibly it had not even been named yet—needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a language of his own, which he called B. B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain. Its name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie, or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas.
""" (The Development of the C Language)-
[Thompson 69] references K. Thompson, `Bon—an Interactive Language,' undated AT&T Bell Laboratories internal memorandum (ca. 1969)
-- please get in touch if you have a hyperlink for this document as I can't find it indexed on any search engines.
[Thompson 69] references K. Thompson, `Bon—an Interactive Language,' undated AT&T Bell Laboratories internal memorandum (ca. 1969). This is possibly Bon User's Manual.
+Please get in touch if you have a hyperlink for this document as I can't find it indexed on any search engines.
This language described in The C Programming Language isn't the C programming language known by most. It was a pre-standardization, relatively prototypical C, and rather than being codified in ANSI its primary documentation was the book by Kernighan and Ritchie (this book would later be known colloquially as K&R).