rfm@frog.UUCP (Bob Mabee, Software) (11/12/86)
In article <148600179@uiucuxc> hamilton@uiucuxc.CSO.UIUC.EDU writes: >BCPL was developed in britain (the "c" stands for "Cambridge"). > BCPL isn't solely a british dialect. it was used extensively at >Xerox Parc about 10 years ago, for operating system R&D. BCPL was in fact developed (by Martin Richards) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on MIT's time-sharing system CTSS, which was a hotbed of language development. The first partial implementation was actually written in AED, an Algol variant, and bootstrapped (rewritten in BCPL and fed through the first compiler) circa 1967. BCPL was intended to be a stepping-stone to implementation of CPL, a very elaborate, fully-type-checked language designed (by Chris Strachey, Martins's professor at Cambridge University) for compiler writing. BCPL inherited the powerful control structures of CPL, of which C or Pascal has only a tiny fraction, but omitted the type checking because it would make specifying the language harder, make the compiler larger (a real problem on CTSS, which had 32 K words of core for the user), and add very little useful functionality for the programmer. BCPL became a popular language for many of the same reasons C has: Because it was designed by one person for his own use on a particular task, it had fewer of the features that make languages hard to learn, make compilers too big, and add run-time overhead. BCPL was often the only native compiler (except Fortran) on small minicomputers. Thus, BCPL stands for Basic CPL or Bootstrap CPL, where CPL stands for Cambridge Programming Language or Chris's Programming Language.