
Ask HN: Anyone have experience or knowledge of low-level languages - wglb
Looking for experience or knowledge of low-level systems programming languages akin to PL360, or PL&#x2F;x or PL&#x2F;s?  These languages deal with machine objects, like registers, are lower-level than C but are syntactically a higher level than assembley.
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drallison
I have some knowledge and experience with low-level systems programming
languages. What is it you want to know?

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wglb
Which architectures are they for, and what is the general syntax, and what the
usage of the language is.

Thanks for reply.

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drallison
Machine-oriented languages generally are machine specific and play to a
limited audience of systems programmers. As global optimization has become
more standard and more accessible, machine-oriented languages have become less
significant.

Machine-oriented languages are "machine-oriented" because they provide the
programmer with constructs which allocate resources (memory, registers) and
allow programmatic access architectural features that are not comprehended by
standard programming languages.

The ultimate machine-oriented language is assembly language where programs are
written in native machine code. When combined with a good macro processor,
programming in assembler can be effective and satisfying. Writing good
assembler code can be an exercise in restraint since it is easy to write
incomprehensible programs that are difficult to understand and debug.

Mark Rain (Ivan Godard) organized a conference on machine-oriented languages
you might want to read. W. L. van der Poel (editor) Proceedings of a
Conference on Machine-Oriented Language, Trondheim, 1973 North Holland, 1974.
The CMU machine-oriented languge BLISS, PL360, and PL/S and others were
influential in their day, as were the various Burroughs Algol systems. In
fact, some Burroughs machines did not have an assembler and were programmed
only in Algol (with extensions). There is a description of how the chicken &
egg problem was solve and the Algol bootstrapped in Don Knuth's books.

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wglb
I do have significant experience in this area. I am looking to see if there
are any in current use, ones that I haven't heard of.

I have worked directly with two of these. Three of us wrote a compiler for a
PL/M derivative in Bliss 36 running on the DEC PDP-10. And we tinkered briefly
with PL32 on the vax. The team that brought XPL to the Sigma 5/7/9 series also
wrote a low-level PL/S style language. I'm trying to locate the paper for
that, so far with no luck. I'm familiar with the Burroughs low-level algol
efforts, and am fascinated by the B 1700, which had an machine word size that
was set on a per-program basis.

Fundamental to this is that they are machine specific, and I am seeing that
there are some possible advantages to that.

Thanks for the references. As a result, I ran across
[http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages...](http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages.pdf)
which connects with many of my memories. And the Belt architecture is quite
fascinating, but it doesn't seem to be moving very fast. I now add to the list
one called PL-11 for the PDP-11.

I was first exposed to the chicken and egg problem in _A Compiler Generator_
which launched my career in another direction.

Thanks much for the rich references which are directly useful to my search.

(montana expat here)

