B Coding Language
B is a coding language that was created about 1969 at Bell Labs. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie came up with the idea for it.
Its name could be a contraction of BCPL, as B was formed from BCPL. Dennis Ritchie, Thompson’s coworker, thought that the name was inspired by Bon, an earlier but unrelated programming language that Thompson created for the Multics.
B was created for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent program like system and language software.
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The only data type was whatever the underlying machine’s natural memory word format was. The word was either regarded as an integer or as a memory address, depending on the context.
Support for character data stuffed in memory words became critical as machines with ASCII processing became more ubiquitous, such as the DEC PDP-11 that arrived at Bell.
What happened to B? Why don’t we use it now?
The B language lacked the ability to take advantage of the features supplied by the PDP-11, a newer member of the PDP series. Dennis Ritchie began development on a new high-level programming language based on B language at that time. The Unix operating system was greatly influenced by C. In reality, most of the Unix system, including a significant portion of its kernel, is now written in C.
