B Programming Language – Talk, Vintage Computing Festival Berlin 2024

A talk on the B programming language, precursor of C,held at Vintage Computing Festival Berlin 2024 by Angelo Papenhoff (known for his involvement in the PiDP-11 and the upcoming PiDP-1 projects).

From the video description:

Everyone knows about C, but only few have seen its predecessor B. Unlike C, B was not compiled to machine code but to various incarnations of an interpreted code. Unfortunately, the original B compiler does not seem to have survived, but the interpreter, standard library and a few binaries have. With this it was possible to recreate a compiler – of course written in B itself – that is reasonably close to what it would have been around 1971. Because B is so minimal it is a perfect language to study how a simple compiler works. In the talk you will see what B is like, how it works, how it was reconstructed, and of course see it running under the first edition of UNIX.

Alternative source/URL: The B Programming Language - media.ccc.de

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Very nice! A couple of links from the presentation:

B has been confirmed to compile itself on the following platforms:

  • Linux amd64
  • Linux mips32 (ci20 devboard)
  • Linux riscv64
  • 2.11BSD PDP-11
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