| Newsgroups |
gmane.comp.emulators.hercules390.mvs |
| Message-ID |
<[email protected]> |
Joe,
For once I agree with you. “B” is pretty much “C” but with only machine words as types. There is no floating point but you can write functions to handle it. Strings exist as characters packed four to a word. It was used a lot in the Academic Honeywell world where I first met it.. There is more info here:-
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bintro.html
it would be nice to have an original “B” compiler available…..
Dave
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Sent: 06 October 2019 12:33
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [H390-MVS] Class Notes for a PL/I Course.
"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] <mailto:berndoppolzer-/[email protected]> [H390-MVS] <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
Am 06.10.2019 um 10:59 schrieb Giuseppe Vitillaro giuseppe-yuD/ahkh7LvrZ44/[email protected] <mailto: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
..
<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=2587966/grpspId=1705309548/msgId=19251/stime=1570352390>
<http://y.analytics.yahoo.com/fpc.pl?ywarid=515FB27823A7407E&a=10001310322279&js=no&resp=img>