Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!firth
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited
Message-ID: <5454@bd.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 27 Dec 89 15:00:24 GMT
References: <1TmbNv#4mK14j=eric@snark.uu.net> <PCG.89Dec17184350@rupert.cs.aber.ac.uk> <1989Dec18.192301.3863@ico.isc.com>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 40

In article <1989Dec18.192301.3863@ico.isc.com> rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:

>Pascal was a result of the war, not the precipitator.
...
>I'd say that BCPL had really become significant *before* the Pascal/
>Algol 68 flap...although it was certainly alive and well then.

The documents I think support both these assertions.

(1) The publication of record introducing Pascal is Acta Informatica
    vol 1 pp 35-63, entitled 'The Programming Language Pascal'.  The
    journal most helpfully includes dates of submission as well as
    dates of publication; it received Wirth's paper on 1970 October 30.

(2) The summary to the paper begins thus:

	A programming language called Pascal is described
	which was developed on the basis of Algol-60, its
	range of applicability is considerably increased
	due to a variety of data structuring facilities.

    The language was developed by Wirth in the period 1969/70, after
    he had broken with the Algol-6X group, and in part as an attempt
    to demonstrate the feasability of his ideas, which, of course,
    owe a lot to Algol-W and to Hoare's work on data structures.

(3) At the time of publication, there was one full Pascal compiler,
    written in Pascal and executing on the CDC 6600.  (This had
    some bizarre consequences that still plague us, including the
    line oriented IO, inherited alas by Ada.)

(4) By contrast, BCPL had reached the same stage four years earlier,
    and by 1969 had been ported to the Titan at Cambridge.  The
    first edition of the Cambridge BCPL manual was issued in the
    same year.  The BCPL porting kit was issued in 1971; the date
    on the accompanying compiler documentation is August 1971.

Incidentally, I have a copy of the Cambridge Algol-68C compiler.
It is indeed a fine piece of work, and much of it could profitably
be studied today.