During research for my talk “History and Spirit of C and C++” (pdf, 11Mb) I realized that the reference manual Ken Thompson wrote for B in 1972 (pdf) was in parts a verbatim copy of the reference manual that Martin Richards wrote for BCPL in 1967 (pdf) (in particular look at page 6 in both documents or see slide 118-126 in my presentation). I guess that is fair as B is semantically basically the same language as BCPL. However, the odd thing is that in the more official reference manual for C dated 1974 (pdf), BCPL is not even mentioned at all.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Perhaps this is just another kudos to Bell Labs, but I certainly found it interesting. It has to be said though that in all the interviews and later writings I have seen by members of Bell Labs, including Ritchie and Thompson, they are very open about BCPL being the main inspiration for B and C.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2015 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.