kwrich@ihuxz.ATT.COM (Kevin Richardson) (06/22/88)
Hello, Curiosity has gotten the best of me and I've been wondering whether or not I could recompile some code that I discovered. The code is written in BLISS (Basic Language for Implementing System Software), a language developed at Carnegie Mellon in the mid to early 1970s. My question is whether or not anyone has or knows of the existence of a BLISS compiler for a UNIX System. Any referral or response would be appreciated. -- +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Kevin Richardson, AT&T Bell Laboratories, ihnp4!ihuxz!kwrich, x3175
jensen@gt-eedsp.UUCP (P. Allen Jensen) (06/23/88)
Is the CMU Bliss the same as the BLISS used by DEC ? The one from DEC
is a Medium (as opposed to High or Assembler) level language that is
a lot like a cross of C and Pascal - Block structured like Pascal but
with pointers and week type checking like C. If it is the DEC language,
it may only be available under VMS - any DEC people out there ?
P. Allen Jensen
Georgia Tech, School of Electrical Engineering, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250
USENET: ...!{allegra,hplabs,ihnp4,ulysses}!gatech!gt-eedsp!jensen
INTERNET: jensen@gteedsp.gatech.edu
--
P. Allen Jensen
Georgia Tech, School of Electrical Engineering, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250
USENET: ...!{allegra,hplabs,ihnp4,ulysses}!gatech!gt-eedsp!jensen
INTERNET: jensen@gteedsp.gatech.edureid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid) (06/24/88)
People are asking about BLISS. BLISS was invented at Carnegie-Mellon in the late 1960's, and was first implemented for the PDP-10 as Bliss-10. A better, incompatible version for the PDP-11 was developed, called (oddly enough) Bliss-11. In the middle 1970's, DEC picked up BLISS, filled it full of dollar signs and long mnemonic names, and produced BLISS-36 (a successor to BLISS-10), BLISS-16 (a successor to BLISS-11) and BLISS-32 (for the Vax). I don't believe that BLISS-16 ever amounted to much, since it was implemented only as a cross-compiler from the PDP-10 (as was Bliss-11, come to think of it). Then DEC found a set of macros that could be layered on top of BLISS-36, BLISS-32, and BLISS-16 to implement a machine-independent common version, which I think was called Common BLISS or something like that. A lot of VMS is written in BLISS. Unfortunately, not enough of it is. Far too much of VMS is written in VAX assembler. At some point in there, some people at Bell Labs produced 98% of a Bliss compiler for an IBM 360 or a Honeywell or an Interdata or something like that, but in general BLISS exists/existed only for DEC machines. I've always liked BLISS. It's the world's greatest assembler. It doesn't have pretenses of having data types, like C, and it is very regular and very simple. Its most notorious feature was the need for an explicit "value of", operator: if you wanted to do the equivalent of the C statement x = y + 1; in Bliss, you had to say x := .y + 1; The "." means "contents of y", since all expressions evaluated to addresses and not values. (If you just said "y + 1", then it added 1 to the address of y and not the contents of y). While this was a big nuisance, and led to expressions like Z[.A+.B] := .A[.A[.I-4]] that are as awful as C type declarations, it also let you do jazzy stuff like F(X) := 3; which would call the function F with the argument X, which would return an address. The number 3 would then be stored into that address. BLISS had very sophisticated control structures, much nicer than C has. I think the dot operator for dereferencing was what doomed it, though to this day I would rather be programming in Bliss than in C. The people who designed and implemented the first few Blisses included Chuck Geschke, who is now president of Adobe Systems, Bruce Leverett, who works for Scribe Systems, Richard Johnsson, who works with me at DEC. Ron Brender was the major guru of Bliss at DEC. Probably still is.
simmons@applga.uucp (Steve Simmons) (06/24/88)
In article <315@gt-eedsp.UUCP> jensen@gt-eedsp.UUCP (P. Allen Jensen) writes: > >Is the CMU Bliss the same as the BLISS used by DEC ? In '83 I was supporting some BLISS-10 utilities at ADP Network Services. We ran into bugs in the DEC BLISS-10 compiler which DEC wouldn't fix. We had source, which was full of CMU names. I went to CM to see if theirs was PD, and if so, could we get it. On doing some comparison, we found that the DEC BLISS-10 compiler was absolutely identical to the CMU except for a few bug fixes CMU had done since DEC picked it up. About this time DEC came out with the BLISS-16, BLISS-32, and BLISS-36 compilers to be their "standard systems development language". They wanted a ludicrous amount of money for BLISS-36. We ordered an evaluation copy, and found it was absolutely identical to BLISS-10. Same checksum. And same support categore. I forget the name, but it meant "We will accept bug reports. But we will take no action." That's the way it was in '83. Needless to say, we didn't buy BLISS-36. If you can get BLISS from CMU and you have a PDP-10 machine, do it. -- +- Steve Simmons UNIX Systems Mgr. Schlumberger CAD/CAM -+ + simmons@applga.uucp ...umix!applga!simmons + +- "Opinions expressed are all my own, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc." -+