Today I Learned (TIL)

6556 readers

1 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Kokomheart@lemmy.ca

JCSpark@lemmy.ca

TIL about 'B', the programming language (en.m.wikipedia.org)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Influenced by BCPL, PL/I, TMG

Influenced C

B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software. 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The memory word size is the amount of bites your CPU can hold and proces in a single cycle. The word size of a modern computer is usually 64 bit.

[–] Jeeve65@ttrpg.network 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There was no question in the post. I'm pretty sure that poster knows what "word size" is in this context.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

There was a (sort of) question

whatever that might be

[–] aard@kyu.de 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

the "whatever that might be" in that context meant "the machine dependent format could be anything, and it wouldn't matter for B"

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Ah oke