I take no issue with the acknowledgment of being on the losing side of a technical argument – provided evidence compels.
However, to be entirely candid, I have submitted two references and a direct quotation throughout the discourse in support of the position – each of which has been summarily dismissed with an appeal to some ostensibly «older, truer origin», presented without citation, without substantiation, and, most tellingly, without the rigour such a claim demands.
It is important to recall that during the formative years of programming language development, there were no formal standards, no governing design committees. Each compiled copy of a language – often passed around on a tape and locally altered, sometimes severely – became its own dialect, occasionally diverging to the point of incompatibility with its progenitor.
Therefore, may I ask that you provide specific and credible sources – ones that not only support your historical assertion, but also clarify the particular lineage, or flavour, of the language in question? Intellectual honesty demands no less – and rhetorical flourish is no substitute for evidence.
What you say is right, and it would have been less lazy for me to provide links to the documents that I have quoted.
On the other hand, I have provided all the information that is needed for anyone to find those documents through a Web search, in a few seconds.
I have the quoted documents, but it is not helpful to know from where they were downloaded a long time ago, because, unfortunately, the Internet URLs are not stable. So for links, I just have to search them again, like anyone else.
These documents can be found in many places.
For instance, searching "b language manual 1972" finds as the first link:
There exists an earlier internal report about Euler from April 1965 at Stanford, before the publication of the language in CACM, where both indirection and address-of were prefix, like later in BCPL. However, before the publication in January 1966, indirection has been changed to be a postfix operator, choice that has been retained in the later languages of Wirth.
However, to be entirely candid, I have submitted two references and a direct quotation throughout the discourse in support of the position – each of which has been summarily dismissed with an appeal to some ostensibly «older, truer origin», presented without citation, without substantiation, and, most tellingly, without the rigour such a claim demands.
It is important to recall that during the formative years of programming language development, there were no formal standards, no governing design committees. Each compiled copy of a language – often passed around on a tape and locally altered, sometimes severely – became its own dialect, occasionally diverging to the point of incompatibility with its progenitor.
Therefore, may I ask that you provide specific and credible sources – ones that not only support your historical assertion, but also clarify the particular lineage, or flavour, of the language in question? Intellectual honesty demands no less – and rhetorical flourish is no substitute for evidence.