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From: danny@calgary.UUCP (Danny Levinson)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: What's BCPL?
Message-ID: <94@calgary.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Jan-86 17:38:16 EST
Article-I.D.: calgary.94
Posted: Wed Jan 29 17:38:16 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 29-Jan-86 19:22:14 EST
References: <1097@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Organization: University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta
Lines: 18

C was indeed derived from BCPL, via an intermediate language B.  I believe
this heritage is mentioned in "The C programming language" (Kernighan &
Ritchie).  The process of derivation seems to have been:

	1) take out all the syntactic & semantic "cleanliness" of BCPL
	   (unless, repeat, repeatwhile, endcase, valof..resultis clauses,
	   mandatory initialisations)
	2) add types in a half-hearted manner (no control over precision),
	   including a horrendous syntax for pointer declaration
	3) hide the "OCODE" (machine independent intermediate object code)
	   interface, making the language infinitely more difficult to
	   port

Of course, there are nice things about C too, such as the fact that Unix
was written in it!

-- danny levinson
   university of calgary