13 Jun
2023
13 Jun
'23
3:28 a.m.
Chris Pinnock via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> once said:
Your paper says there are disagreements about what
it stands for. What gave you that impression?
From https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.unix.wizards/1990-June/033811.html
Dennis Ritchie says:
Actually the acronym (in the sense we took it up;
it may have other credible etymologies) is "Block
Started by Symbol." It was a pseudo-op in FAP
(Fortran Assembly [-er?] Program), an assembler
for the IBM 704-709-7090-7094 machines. It defined
its label and set aside space for a given number
of words. There was another pseudo-op, BES, "Block
Ended by Symbol" that did the same except that the
label was defined by the last assigned word + 1.
(On these machines Fortran arrays were stored
backwards in storage and were 1-origin.)
The usage is reasonably appropriate, because just
as with standard Unix loaders, the space assigned
didn't have to be punched literally into the
object deck but was represented by a count
somewhere.
Cheers,
Anthony
On 12 Jun
2023, at 21:22, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I thought it was pretty well known that it stands for, "Block Started
(by) Symbol”?
I wrote a paper on a.out a year or so ago and
concluded that I could not find an adequate answer
- so avoided the issue with a non-commital
footnote.