Editing B (programming language) (section)

{{Short description|Procedural programming language}}
{{about|a programming language developed at Bell Labs|"b" language of Meertens and Pemberton|ABC (programming language)|other uses|B (disambiguation)}}
{{Infobox programming language
| name = B
| logo = 
| logo caption = 
| paradigm = 
| year = {{start date and age|1969}}<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1663863/B|title=B - computer programming language}}</ref>
| designer = [[Ken Thompson (computer programmer)|Ken Thompson]]
| developer = [[Ken Thompson (computer programmer)|Ken Thompson]], [[Dennis Ritchie]]
| latest_release_version = 
| latest_release_date = 
| latest_test_version = 
| latest_test_date = 
| turing-complete = yes
| typing = typeless (everything is a [[Word (computer architecture)|word]])
| dialects = 
| influenced_by = [[BCPL]], [[PL/I]], [[TMG (language)|TMG]]
| influenced = [[C (programming language)|C]]
| operating_system = 
| license = 
| website = 
| file_ext = .b
}}

'''B''' is a [[programming language]] developed at [[Bell Labs]] circa 1969 by [[Ken Thompson (computer programmer)|Ken Thompson]] and [[Dennis Ritchie]].

B was derived from [[BCPL]], and its name may possibly be a contraction of BCPL.  Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on [[Multics]].{{refn|group=note|"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 [[Bon|a religion]] whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas."<ref name="chist">{{cite journal| first = Dennis M.| last = Ritchie| author-link = Dennis Ritchie|   title = The Development of the C Language| date=March 1993 | journal = ACM SIGPLAN Notices|  volume = 28 |   issue = 3|   pages = 201–208|     url = http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html|  doi = 10.1145/155360.155580|doi-access = free}}</ref>}}

B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software.<ref name=bur>{{cite web
|      first = Ken
|       last = Thompson
| author-link = Ken Thompson (computer programmer)
|      title = Users' Reference to B
|        date= 7 January 1972
| access-date = 21 March 2014
|  publisher = Bell Laboratories
|        url = https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.pdf
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20150317033259/https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kbman.pdf
|archive-date = 17 March 2015
}}</ref> It was a typeless language, with the only data type being the underlying machine's natural [[memory word]] format, whatever that might be. Depending on the context, the word was treated either as an [[integer]] or a [[memory address]].

As machines with [[ASCII]] processing became common, notably the [[DEC PDP-11]] that arrived at Bell Labs, support for character data stuffed in memory words became important. The typeless nature of the language was seen as a disadvantage, which led Thompson and Ritchie to develop an expanded version of the language supporting new internal and user-defined types, which became the ubiquitous [[C programming language]].