Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Pointer incrementation and assignme
Message-ID: <1989Jun4.024038.8562@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2015@csuna.csun.edu> <236100012@mirror> <1929@ektools.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4 Jun 89 02:40:38 GMT

In article <1929@ektools.UUCP> randolph@ektools.UUCP (Gary L. Randolph) writes:
>I recall, from my PDP 11 assembler days, two addressing modes;
>autoincrement and autodecrement.  I believe that something of this nature
>had *much* more to do with the post and preincrement/decrement operators
>than did K&R's typing skills.

I made the same mistake a while ago, and Dennis corrected me:  ++ and --
date to the pdp7 days and the B language, and have nothing in particular
to do with the pdp11 addressing modes.  The 7 had a vaguely similar feature
in the hardware, although it was more difficult to exploit, and this may
have inspired Ken Thompson, but the code-generation aspects were not
significant, since B was an interpreted language.  The operators definitely
started out as a notational convenience.
-- 
You *can* understand sendmail, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
but it's not worth it. -Collyer| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu