bit or maybe byte (B). (1996-11-03)

(a) Abbreviation for Baumé, a hydrometer scale. (See Baumé.) Thus 10º B. means "ten degrees Baumé." (b) Symbol for the coefficient of induced magnetization, or the number of lines per square centimeter induced in a magnetic circuit or in any specified part of it.

1. byte. 2. <language> A systems language written by Ken Thompson in 1970 mostly for his own use under Unix on the PDP-11. B was later improved by Kerninghan(?) and Ritchie to produce C. B was used as the systems language on Honeywell's GCOS-3. B was, according to Ken, greatly influenced by BCPL, but the name B had nothing to do with BCPL. B was in fact a revision of an earlier language, bon, named after Ken Thompson's wife, Bonnie. ["The Programming Language B", S.C. Johnson & B.W. Kernighan, CS TR 8, Bell Labs (Jan 1973)]. [Features? Differences from C?] (1997-02-02) 3. <language> A simple interactive programming language by Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton. B was the predecessor of ABC. ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/languages/B.tar.Z. ["Draft Proposal for the B Language", Lambert Meertens, CWI, Amsterdam, 1981]. 4. <language, specification> A specification language by Jean-Raymond Abrial of B Core UK, Magdalen Centre, Oxford Science Park, Oxford OX4 4GA. B is related to Z and supports development of C code from specifications. B has been used in major safety-critical system specifications in Europe, and is currently attracting increasing interest in industry. It has robust, commercially available tool support for specification, design, proof and code generation. E-mail: <Ib.Sorensen@comlab.ox.ac.uk>. (1995-04-24)

Alternative used in place of a friend's name.
What's up b?

Ƃ (minuscule: ƃ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Cyrillic Б б in appearance.

<b>Bb> is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

B was derived from BCPL, and its name may possibly be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics.

B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software. It was a typeless language, with the only data type being the underlying machine's natural memory word format, whatever that might be. Depending on the context, the word was treated either as an integer or a memory address.

As machines with ASCII processing became common, notably the DEC PDP-11 that arrived at Bell, support for character data stuffed in memory words became important. The typeless nature of the language was seen as a disadvantage, which led Thompson and Ritchie to develop an expanded version of the language supporting new internal and user-defined types, which became the C programming language.