Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!lll-winken!uunet!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: (BCPL Syntax) Re: language commenting constructs
Message-ID: <3510@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 21 Mar 89 21:16:19 GMT
References: <1543@zen.UUCP> <10460@lanl.gov> <39273@oliveb.olivetti.com> <4799@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Organization: Xenix Support
Lines: 33

In article <4799@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>, toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) writes:
> You are actually missing a certain subtlety here.  The BCPL statement
> when executed assigns the address of the code segment to variable min2.

That's semantics. I thought we were talking about BCPL syntax.

> BCPL (at least on the IBM 360 that I used around 1970) linked separate
> compilation modules in an interesting way:

BCPL in Tripos (an O/S from Cambridge University) does the same thing.

> 1. BCPL maintains a global common area with numbered (ugh!) slots.

Ugh is the word. The Amiga O/S uses part of Tripos as the file system.
BCPL Global Vectors and other weirdnesses are painfully obvious when you
get into it.

> Pretty clever, heh? Sorta looks a bit like Modula-2?

How do you figure? Looks more like Forth (semantically, not syntactically)
if anything.

> If you are really tricky, you could do something like:

> 	temp, min, max := min, max, temp

And, like the COBOL "ALTER" verb you're crazy if you try it. Besides, I
thought "min, max := min, max" would do the job.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.
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