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I asked a question about the origins of the XOR operator a while back.

Ken Thompson was emailed by the accepted answerer and provided a response, in fact!

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3313...

Also for ampersand! https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2520...

I'm not sure XOR/^ was added by Ken himself because it is not in his original B language and while the earliest C compiler can parse it, it can't generate code for it. I think it was Steve Johnson or Dennis Ritchie. Now B originally did have a ^ but that stood for OR because | was in the lower case region of ASCII.

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