Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!alice!dmr
From: dmr@alice.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited
Message-ID: <10267@alice.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 89 09:42:40 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 38

Grandi writes:

 > It was only after PL/1 was designed and looked like becoming a standard that
 > (apparently to please GE and BTL, the industrial partners) they decided to
 > switch to PL/1, and a first, half cooked, compiler for it was written from
 > scratch, *after* the BCPL had already been done. I sure remember having a
 > look at the Multics BCPL compiler and seeing that it seemed *very* old (and
 > nobody knew about it anyhow).


He is wrong; just about the first thing I did on coming to Bell
Labs was to work on the port of the BCPL compiler to Multics.  In fact
I wrote the bcpl command, which, just like cc , called in the various
compiler phases.  (By the time I arrived, Rudd Canaday and Ken Thompson
had done the real work of making Martin Richards' 7094 compiler
generate GE 645 code instead.)  In due course announcement of this
compiler appeared in the MSPM as unofficially supported software.  The
operating system was already a going concern, though not a commercial
product, by then (1968).  This BCPL compiler is indeed very old;
if Grandi has really looked at it, he has looked at characters
typed by me, in that year, into a Multics system written in PL/1.

The first versions of Multics were written in EPL, for `Early PL/1',
a dialect of PL/1 whose compiler was written by Doug McIlroy and
Bob Morris.  I assure you that the EPL compiler is older than
the BCPL compiler, so old that it has vanished except perhaps
in someone's file cabinet.  In 1969 or so a full PL/1 compiler,
courtesy of Freiburghouse etc. of GE was introduced.

The person who took a sabbatical at Waterloo was Steve Johnson.
He had a real shock.  He took B there and planted its seed,
but when he came back to Bell Labs, C had appeared, and Alan
Snyder had already converted SCJ's yacc program from B into C....


	Dennis Ritchie
	dmr@research.att.com
	att!research!dmr