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bon users manual

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<PRE>"""</PRE> <PRE>"""</PRE>
<P>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.</P> <P>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.</P>
<PRE>""" (<I>The Development of the C Language</I>)</PRE> <PRE>""" (<I>The Development of the C Language</I>)</PRE>
<P>[Thompson 69] references <CODE>K. Thompson, `Bon—an Interactive Language,' undated AT&amp;T Bell Laboratories internal memorandum (ca. 1969)</CODE> <P>[Thompson 69] references <CODE>K. Thompson, `Bon—an Interactive Language,' undated AT&amp;T Bell Laboratories internal memorandum (ca. 1969)</CODE>. This is possibly <A HREF="http://people.csail.mit.edu/saltzer/Multics/MHP-Saltzer-060508/filedrawers/180.btl-misc/Scan%204.PDF">Bon User's Manual</A>.
- please get in touch if you have a hyperlink for this document as I can't find it indexed on any search engines.</P> Please get in touch if you have a hyperlink for this document as I can't find it indexed on any search engines.</P>
<P> <P>
This language described in <I>The C Programming Language</I> isn't the C programming language known by most. This language described in <I>The C Programming Language</I> 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 <I>K&amp;R</I>). 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 <I>K&amp;R</I>).