My father was a programmer on the BESM-series computers back in the 80s, particularly BESM-6. Him and a few former friends/colleagues maintain a site about it:
Indeed, I only provided direct translations of the programs Ershov and Knuth wrote, I never did much in the way work beyond that, my focus was mainly on recreating the compiler itself.
There were number of innovative but relatively obscure languages that came out of the first wave of cybernetics. Glushkov, one of Lyapunov's contemporaries, created a language called Analytik [1], with early support for linear algebra and symbolic differentiation. REFAL is another language that emerged during the same era and still under active development [2]. At its foundation is an alternative and surprisingly rich algebraic theory of computation based on abstract rewriting systems and so-called word problems [3].
Nice. My grandfather (1) was part of the team for another language, Alpha (2) led by the same person, Ershov (3). My grandfather told me he never was particularly fond of programming, but it was a good way to get paid — guys some things haven't changed much since 1950s.
I have perused those archives many times, more important than the book (of which I have a translated hardback copy), are the notes which include the hand written (and commented) assembly for every draft of the compiler. The hard part is that its not the same as the final version so you have to interpolate the changes.
The П here is uppercase Pi, not P in Cyrillic. The original name of BESM is БЭСМ, Бйстродействуйусхцхайа Електроннайа Сцхотнайа Масхина, i.e. "High-Speed Electronic Computing Machine [0].
reminds me this hotel receptionist in Russia who, when writing my name down the registration paper (visa reasons), did so with this same double/direct transliteration (eg, "shch" to "схцх"). gave me a funny name in the end, and a good chuckle)
Reminds me of a story: My father's parents were Lithuanian, so I have their surname, but I am American. In 2011 I had a Russian visa for a short trip to Moscow. They transliterated my name in a way that I don't think a Lithuanian travelling to Russia would have. Notably, Š was С and not Ш because the diacritic obviously won't appear on my US passport. I think they also had И where I might have put Й.
(a) sorry about the poor transliteration, I cut-n-pasted from TFA
(b) speaking of Ershov — anyone know what became of Рапира? It looks like a nice little language, and presumably many of the same ideas floating around the IFIP that inspired it also eventually led to Python (by way of ABC).
Рапира was provided (IIRC in ROM) with «Агат» computer, and then seems to have died the death of other Soviet programming languages, being replaced by Western imports.
https://www.besm6.org/
Sorry, the site's all in Russian, and it's running on my dad's NetBSD server at his house. Please be gentle :)