Everyone knows about C, but only few have seen its predecessor B. Unlike C, B was not compiled to machine code but to various incarnations of an interpreted code. Unfortunately, the original B compiler does not seem to have survived, but the interpreter, standard library and a few binaries have. With this it was possible to recreate a compiler – of course written in B itself – that is reasonably close to what it would have been around 1971. Because B is so minimal it is a perfect language to study how a simple compiler works. In the talk you will see what B is like, how it works, how it was reconstructed, and of course see it running under the first edition of UNIX.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/