Talk:B programming language

B to U of W

The Bell Labs alumnus, would that be Steve Johnson? I understand he wrote Yacc in B, and then left for U of W. Then Alan Snyder came to the Labs (from MIT). This was the time of the transition from B to C, so he rewrote Yacc in C. This was a surprise for Steve when he came back to the Labs. Alan later went back to MIT, and wrote a C compiler running on ITS. Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 07:59, 11 January 2019 (CET)

Right, I thought it was Steve J, but I wasn't sure, and couldn't turn up a reference in a quick search. (Maybe it's in the TUHS archive somewhere.) So I left it anonymous, since I didn't want to chance on my memory being wrong. Do you have a reference? (Yeah, I could have asked him, but I didn't want to bug him.) Jnc (talk) 14:08, 11 January 2019 (CET)

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html, "Steve Johnson visited the University of Waterloo on sabbatical in 1972, he brought B with him. It became popular on the Honeywell machines there, and later spawned Eh and Zed (the Canadian answers to `what follows B?'). When Johnson returned to Bell Labs in 1973, he was disconcerted to find that the language whose seeds he brought to Canada had evolved back home; even his own yacc program had been rewritten in C, by Alan Snyder. " Larsbrinkhoff (talk) 15:23, 11 January 2019 (CET)

Oh, right, I knew I'd seen it somewhere - forgot it was there. Thanks! Jnc (talk) 16:52, 11 January 2019 (CET)