C Lineage Languages

C Lineage Languages groups the systems programming languages that trace a direct line of descent to C, each written to strip down or extend its immediate predecessor's design in pursuit of a smaller, faster compiler running on limited hardware. BCPL, created by Martin Richards, was cut down by Ken Thompson at Bell Labs into B, a language carrying BCPL's own semantics in a leaner syntax, built to write utilities for the early Unix system. Dennis Ritchie then reworked B into C starting in 1971, adding the features the more powerful PDP-11 hardware could support. Each step in this line kept the same terse, low level orientation toward direct memory access and portability across machines, the trait that let C itself become the dominant systems language of the following decades. Wikipedia's History of the C programming language documents this direct chain from BCPL through B to C.