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"C is, AFAIK, a direct offspring of BCPL; there were older languages called
A and B. I don't really know BCPL, but from what I heard, BCPL is an
advanced
version of B, and, in contrast to C, it had no other types than int."
Actually Bernd I think it is the other way around.
B is an offshoot of BCPL. C is the stepchild of B.
Joe
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 5:35 AM Bernd Oppolzer berndoppolzer-/[email protected]
[H390-MVS] <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> Am 06.10.2019 um 10:59 schrieb Giuseppe Vitillaro giuseppe-yuD/ahkh7LvrZ44/[email protected]
> [H390-MVS]:
>
> ?
>
>
> By the way reading around, I've found these references
>
> PL/I(F) 1966 IBM - New York Programming Center - Hursley (UK)
> BCPL 1967 Martin Richards - University of Cambridge
> C 1972 Dennis Ritchie - AT&T Bell Labs
>
> which drive what seems, to my eyes, a thread rooting
> these languaes to ALGOL (1958), through a strict relationship
> between them.
>
> That would explain why our PL/I(F) lack LEAVE/ITERATE.
>
> I bet we would find them in BCPL loops? Hence those constructs
> would have born between 1966 and 1972? Probably with BCPL in 1967?
>
> Anyone have time to add real history references to
> this too simple scheme?
>
>
> If you don't yet know it (which I doubt, because it is well known in the
> community),
> you should read this:
>
> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-emperors-old-clothes
>
> by C.A.R. Hoare
>
> on page 82, he mentions PL/1.
>
> Some things I heard about programming languages history:
>
> IBM "invented" PL/1 together with the S/360 product line, and it was meant
> to
> turn all other languages obsolete. Special regard was made to Fortran and
> COBOL;
> these two languages dominated the scientific (Fortran) and the commercial
> (COBOL)
> market at that time. ALGOL was a European language, defined in 1958 by
> Rutishauser
> et. al. and was not very interesting in the USA at that time, but there
> were many ALGOL
> compilers on European hardware. (Niklaus Wirth, BTW, did or supported a
> very early
> port of ALGOL to the 360 machine, called ALGOL W, which was pretty
> successful).
>
> It was very late when IBM decided that it was necessary to add
> the ALGOL block concept (which was unique to ALGOL at that time) to PL/1.
> Nobody today could imagine PL/1 without this, and all modern languages
> of course have the ALGOL block concept (in this sense, COBOL and Fortran
> are not modern, sorry). AFAIK, the first experimental versions of PL/1
> (then called NPL) didn't have it. The name NPL (new programming language)
> had to be dropped, because the acronym was already in use in the UK for
> national physics laboratory.
>
> C is, AFAIK, a direct offspring of BCPL; there were older languages called
> A and B. I don't really know BCPL, but from what I heard, BCPL is an
> advanced
> version of B, and, in contrast to C, it had no other types than int.
>
> I'm very interested in Programming Languages History, but is it not always
> easy
> to verify all the influences one language had on another language; it's
> all
> about people, you know ... nobody knows what the language designers at
> that time had in their mind, we only see the results today (if they didn't
> write down their motivations).
>
> Kind regards
>
> Bernd
>
>
> .
>
>
>