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Re:Why is this C++ code faster than my hand-written assembly... by mark-r on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @06:00PM (#15076738)
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...

Re:Why is this C++ code faster than my hand-written assembly... by vram22 on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @06:32PM (#15076940)
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. ]