B came from BCPL which came from CPL which came from ALGOL 60. The main thing ab...

pmcjones · 2024-11-09T15:19:41 1731165581

For a look at how BCPL developed (by being easily ported to new machines), see: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/BCPL

kjs3 · 2024-11-09T22:08:54 1731190134

I always thought BCPL would have been a great language for 80s era micros. Fortunately, we had Turbo Pascal.

pmcjones · 2024-11-09T22:11:57 1731190317

But C was better because it incorporated byte addressing (BCPL was based on word addresses).

kjs3 · 2024-11-10T21:28:15 1731274095

Except the contemporary C compilers were uniformly terrible.

musicale · 2024-11-09T06:53:27 1731135207

Indeed. And they're all algol descendants as you note.

But there is certainly a difference between c-like syntax (java, javascript...) vs. algol-like syntax (pascal, ada, ...)

pjmlp · 2024-11-09T10:01:00 1731146460

And BCPL means Bootstraping CPL, it was never intended to anything beyond bootstraping the CPL compiler that never came to be, as the project folded.

fanf2 · 2024-11-09T20:15:23 1731183323

No, BCPL was Basic CPL. BCPL was created in 1967 after the CPL project ground to a halt in 1966, based on the subset of CPL used in the CPL compiler.

pjmlp · 2024-11-09T20:35:24 1731184524

Apparently everyone is wrong on Internet.

> BCPL has been rumored to have originally stood for "Bootstrap Cambridge Programming Language", but CPL was never created since development stopped at BCPL, and the acronym was later reinterpreted for the BCPL book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

fanf2 · 2024-11-10T15:03:50 1731251030

I have seen no evidence of this in papers by Martin Richards, including the earliest BCPL manual or the contemporary papers on CPL by Strachey et al.

The descriptions of how the CPL compiler worked (eg Strachey’s paper on GPM, Richards more recent retrospectives) all talk about writing the compiler in CPL and translating it by hand to macro assembly.

I have not yet managed to look at Richards PhD thesis which contains the first draft description of BCPL, which he sketched after working on the CPL compiler and shortly before moving to MIT where he first implemented BCPL.