History of C (Re: Why do you use a devil as a mascot?)

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Sun Nov 14 03:09:59 2010
> Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:00:35 -0800
> From: perryh at pluto.rain.com
> To: perrin at apotheon.com
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: History of C (Re: Why do you use a devil as a mascot?)
>
> Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 02:32:04PM -0600, Robert Bonomi wrote:
> > > should the one-leter name for 'c++' be 'd' or 'p'?
> > > (nobody could decide/agree, which *IS* why it is 'c++'
> > > to this day)
> >
> > ... D is already another programming language ...
>
> It wasn't back then :)
>
> > I don't know what this P has to do with it.
>
> You have revealed yourself as a newbie :)
>
> In the beginning there was CPL, the "Combined Programming Language."
> It was large enough to be infeasible to implement using then-current
> technologies, so the "Bootstrap Combined Programming Language" (BCPL)
> was invented, with the intent that the first CPL compiler would be
> written in BCPL.
>
> CPL never amounted to much -- I don't know whether it was ever
> implemented at all -- but BCPL developed a following.

Trivia:  BCPL was the _first_ programming language to use 'curly braces'
to group statements.  It also used '//' to indroduce a 'single-line comment'.

>                                                        Someone
> (at Bell Labs?) 

Ken Thompson, 1969

>                 produced a derivative called B, from which a few
> researchers at Murray Hill derived C.

Mostly one.  Dennis Ritchie, circa 1972.  Brian Kernighan contributed, 
and Ken stuck his oar in occasionally.

>                                        Thus the question:  should
> the next language in the series be named D (next alphabetically)
> or P (next letter of BCPL)?