Interesting, so the C creators used a feature in their language, that was hardware-specific. I thought (from having read K&R) that one goal of C was to be hardware-independent. Maybe this was an exception, or maybe that auto-increment was common to many computer designs at that time.

Wikipedia states that its inclusion in B (the ancestor to C) was independent of the PDP-11 instruction set, which hadn't been invented yet [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Increment_and_decrement_operat...

Cool.

Wow, B. A blast from the past, sort of. I had read a good book about BCPL (the ancestor to B) many years ago. IIRC, it was by Martin Richards, inventor of BCPL. Pretty interesting book and language. BCPL and B were both typeless languages, or languages with just one type, the machine word (16 or 32 bits, don't remember). Still I found that many algorithms and programs were expressed rather compactly in BCPL - or so it seemed to me at the time. Was quite junior then, and without exposure to more advanced programming languages - only knew BASIC and Pascal, probably; even C, I only learned a bit later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Richards_(computer_scie...

Also just saw some other interesting stuff from the BCPL article above:

[ BCPL is the language in which the original hello world program was written.[3] The first MUD was also written in BCPL (MUD1).

Several operating systems were written partially or wholly in BCPL (for example, TRIPOS and the earliest versions of AmigaDOS).

BCPL was also the initial language used in the seminal Xerox PARC Alto project, the first modern personal computer; among other projects, the Bravo document preparation system was written in BCPL. ]