B programming language

B is a programming language that was developed at Bell Labs. It is almost extinct, as it was replaced with the C language. It was mostly the work of Ken Thompson, with contributions from Dennis Ritchie, and first appeared circa 1969. Ken Thompson wrote B basing it mainly on the BCPL language he had used to write Unix while in the Multics project. B was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component that Thompson felt he could do without, in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time. The language also included some changes made to suit Thompson's preferences (mostly along the lines of reducing the number of non-whitespace characters in a typical program). Like BCPL and FORTH, B had only one...