

BCPL, a predecessor of 'C' - jacquesm
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/clive-on-bcpl.html

======
jlees
Oh dear gods no.

 _I first encountered BCPL when I was at Cambridge University, the home of the
language and its designer, Martin Richards._

Same. I was taught this during my undergrad (in the ancient times of
2002-3ish). A course on "Comparative Programming Languages" ended up as 7
lectures on BCPL and 1 on everything else (Lisp, Smalltalk, stuff like that. I
think.) It was terrible.

I now have an in-built knee-jerk reaction to hate BCPL. Especially since he
(Martin Richards, who should never be allowed to lecture, ever) spent at least
one lecture teaching us how to implement types in BCPL.

Yeah. Typed BCPL. Last time I checked, that was called "C".

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I liked BCPL, and still prefer it to C, but I taught it to myself, and never
took lectures from Martin Richards.

Most of the computing done for my PhD was done in BCPL. I still have the code
somewhere, but I can't convert it to C because it uses co-routines.

~~~
jacquesm
<http://www.dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/>

------
mahmud
Kaz took a stab at it recently and found a few surprising features that didn't
remain in C:

[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/6530fc83a74a8a7e?pli=1)

In Summary:

 _I didn't say BCPL is better than its successors. Only that not everything in
its successors is strictly an improvement over its BCPL counterpart._

~~~
ajb
BCPL's predecessor, CPL, had even more features: things like type inference,
closures, polymorphism. It was never completely implemented. The machines at
the time were too small - 4kwords being a typical size. It would probably be
fairly easy nowadays.

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tjr
Interesting that BCPL included both one-line and multi-line comments, but C
did not.

~~~
jacquesm
I used the BBC micro version by Acornsoft in the gray past, it made the
transition to C a lot easier when I finally got my hands on a C compiler (on a
PDP 11 bought for scrap...).

~~~
draegtun
Yes Acorn/Acornsoft did do for some "off the track" languages.... I recall
they did COMAL as well.

~~~
handelaar
There was a LISP as well.

[My school, suddenly in possession of a gifted CS centre full of Beebs, wound
up giving charge of the syllabus after two years to someone who promptly
decided to teach COMAL to everyone in place of (the very sophisticated, for
its time, and structural) BBC Basic. Fortunately I missed out there but they
must have turned out the better part of a thousand basic-level COMAL coders
for no good reason. Apparently these days the same guy's got all the 14-year-
olds passing tests in, but almost certainly not understanding, Smalltalk
instead.]

------
draegtun
Don't see any mention of O-code in that article?

O-Code Machine, a predecessor of JVM:

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-code_machine

~~~
jacquesm
Doesn't the JVM go all the way back to UCSD p-code and Forth ?

~~~
draegtun
And O-code looks like it also precedes them.

