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Greg Ewing see_reply_address at something.invalid
Mon Dec 2 20:55:45 EST 2002 
Laura Creighton wrote:

> 
> Yes there were PDPs which predate the pdp-11 but they did not run C. 

> 
> See: The Development of the C Language
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html


 From that article:

 > Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which
 > increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether
 > the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They
 > were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People
 > often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and
 > auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix
 > first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no
 > PDP-11 when B was developed.

So I was right in thinking that ++ and -- pre-date the PDP-11.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
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