Clem Cole Edited 21-April-2026

The files in this directory are historical documents associated
with the development of the B Programming Language.  Except the the
files B_Manual.{ms,pdf}, these documents were sourced from Dennis
Ritchie's personal webpages at Bell Labs. Nokia, as of this writing,
still maintains that website as:
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/kbman.html


kbman.pdf
	This is a scan made by Dennis in July of 1997 of the
	original B Manual that Ken published on January 7, 1972
	as an internal technical memorandum.

Thompson_B_Manual_19720107.html
	Using Adobe Acrobat, Dennis took the previous document and
	edit it into an HTML webpage, which he posted on his internal
	site.

B_Manual.ms
B_Manual.pdf
	I took version from Dennis and ran it through pandoc(1).
	Then with Ken's original open in another window, I edited
	it to try to make this version to look as much as possible
	to match the original, while adding/correcting errors with
	typeface and layout.  I also corrected a few errors that
	Dennis had created, primarly having to do with the section
	headers.   But I left Ken's errors, such as the lack of
	section 11.0.

---------------------------------------------------------------
					BCPL Notes

	Ken and Dennis were exposed to Richard's BCPL compiler suite
	during their Multics work. I have included these documents
	here with the B documents as the first line of Ken's document
	expresses that B was a direct descendant of BCPL and also
	because Dennis had decided to include the file bcpl.pdf in
	his webpage.

	If the reader has more interest in the B programming language,
	the CHM maintains a website named the "BCPL History Collection"
	and can be found at:
	https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/BCPL/

bcpl.pdf
	This is a scan of the July 21, 1967 Project Mac Memorandum-M-352
	that Martin Richards published in 1967, containing a
	description of a version of BCPL as originally implemented
	for CTSS on the IBM 7094 at MIT.  According to Project Mac
	Progress Report IV, he published a Feb 16, 1968 update
	called M-M352-1.  I can not find that version, although we
	also have found this version of the document.

Richards-BCPL-ReferenceManual.pdf
	This is a different scan of the July 21, 1967 Project Mac
	Memorandum-M-352 that Dennis makes reference too. It was
	printed on a using a different printer/typeball that the
	other copy.  As Dennis mentions in his notes, pages 29-34
	contain the missing example programs from the named "bcpl.pdf"
	copy of the document.




---------------------------------------------------------------

	Bell Laboratories Computing Science Technical Report #8
	(a.k.a. CSTR#8).  Published in January 1973, it was published
	as the next two documents, combined and published together.
	This seems to be the last Bell Labs-authored documentation
	for the language.



bref.html
bref.pdf
	These two files are Steve Johnson's "Users' Reference to
	B" as was implemented on MH-TSS on a Honeywell H6070.


btut.html
btut.pdf
	These two files are Brian Kernighan's "A Tutorial Introduction
	to the Language B" Reference to B" as was implemented on
	MH-TSS on a Honeywell H6070.



---------------------------------------------------------------

			B Language Implementation Notes

	Direct descendants of the Johnson Honeywell compiler can
	still be found that target GCOS-8 and maintained by a
	Canadian firm called Thinkage.
	See: https://www.thinkage.ca/gcos/product-uwtools.htm

	For many years, the most widely B compiler implementation
	suite has been "ybc" (Yasha's B Compiler) as it is
	ABI-compatible with C with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows
	targets.  However, it on produces 32-bit x86 binaries.
	See: https://github.com/AlexCeleste/ybc

	Recently, the LLVM folks have announced "blang" which is
	described as a "B programming language compiler written in
	Go with LLVM IR backend and clang-like command-line interface."
	See: https://github.com/sergev/blang

	Other modern B implementations based on Johnson's reference
	and Brian Kernighan's tutorial can be found by asking Google
	Gemini: "What modern implementations of the B programming
	language can be found"