if <assignment>:
Greg Ewing
see_reply_address at something.invalid
Mon Dec 2 20:55:45 EST 2002
Laura Creighton wrote:
>
> Yes there were PDPs which predate the pdp-11 but they did not run C.
>
> See: The Development of the C Language
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
From that article:
> Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which
> increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether
> the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They
> were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People
> often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and
> auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix
> first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no
> PDP-11 when B was developed.
So I was right in thinking that ++ and -- pre-date the PDP-11.
--
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
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