Online Computer Terms Dictionary - B

B

1. byte.

2. <language> A systems language written by Ken Thompson in 1970 mostly for his own use under Unix on the PDP-11. B was later improved by Kerninghan(?) and Ritchie to produce C. B was used as the systems language on Honeywell's GCOS-3.

B was, according to Ken, greatly influenced by BCPL, but the name B had nothing to do with BCPL. B was in fact a revision of an earlier language, bon, named after Ken Thompson's wife, Bonnie.

["The Programming Language B", S.C. Johnson & B.W. Kernighan, CS TR 8, Bell Labs (Jan 1973)].

[Features? Differences from C?]

(1997-02-02)

3. <language> A simple interactive programming language by Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton. B was the predecessor of ABC.

ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/languages/B.tar.Z.

["Draft Proposal for the B Language", Lambert Meertens, CWI, Amsterdam, 1981].

4. <language, specification> A specification language by Jean-Raymond Abrial of B Core UK, Magdalen Centre, Oxford Science Park, Oxford OX4 4GA. B is related to Z and supports development of C code from specifications. B has been used in major safety-critical system specifications in Europe, and is currently attracting increasing interest in industry. It has robust, commercially available tool support for specification, design, proof and code generation.

E-mail: <Ib.Sorensen@comlab.ox.ac.uk>.

(1995-04-24)