Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!amdcad!lll-crg!caip!daemon From: milazzo@Rice.EDU@caip.RUTGERS.EDU Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga Subject: Re: What's BCPL? Message-ID: <1097@caip.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Tue, 28-Jan-86 01:18:22 EST Article-I.D.: caip.1097 Posted: Tue Jan 28 01:18:22 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 30-Jan-86 01:08:52 EST Sender: daemon@caip.RUTGERS.EDU Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 53 From: Paul Milazzo Mike Schwartz writes: >BCPL stands for the "Before 'C' Programming Language", and was developed >for the PDP-11 many years ago by the folks who brought us UNIX (Ken Thompson, >et al). I believe you can read more in The 'C' Programming Language. Actually, BCPL stands for Basic Combined Programming Language. BCPL was designed in 1967 by Martin Richards of Cambridge. One very good reference on BCPL is: BCPL, the language and its compiler Martin Richards and Colin Whitby-Strevens Cambridge University Press, 1979 QA76.73.B17R5 ISBN 0 521 21965 5 The first paragraph of Chapter 1 of this work gives an excellent summary of the history and purpose of BCPL: The language BCPL (Basic CPL) was originally developed as a compiler-writing tool and, as its name suggests, is closely related to CPL (Combined Programming Language) which was jointly developed at Cambridge and London Universities. CPL is described in Barron et al.[1]. BCPL adopted much of the syntactic richness of CPL, and strives for the same high standard of linguistic elegance; however, in order to achieve the efficiency necessary for systems-programming, its scale and complexity is far less than that of CPL. The most significant simplification is that BCPL has only one data type -- the bit-pattern -- and this feature alone gives it a characteristic flavour which is quite different from that of CPL and most other current programming languages. [1] Barron, D. W., Buxton, J. N., Hartley, D. F., Nixon, E. and Strachey, C. The main features of CPL. Computer Journal, vol. 6, p. 134 (1963). Richards and Whitby-Strevens go on to describe the language, the standard libraries, debugging facilities, and finally the compiler and its intermediate representations. Designed to be portable, the BCPL compiler is itself written in BCPL, and the book includes the entire source to the compiler front end as a "large example". I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about BCPL. A former BCPL hacker, Paul G. Milazzo Dept. of Computer Science Rice University, Houston, TX Domain: milazzo@rice.EDU ARPA: milazzo@rice.ARPA BITNET: milazzo@ricenet, milazzo@ricecsvm UUCP: {cbosgd,convex,hp-pcd,shell,sun,waltz}!rice!milazzo