3 ms·

Bliss is Ignorance Actually it was a very nice language and certainly an improvement over writing system software in assembly language.

• ThomasBHickey 6y ago
  Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than addresses of variables. Used it for a couple of years in the mid '70s before moving on to SAIL.
  • valenciarose 6y ago
    Oh, I have fond memories of 36-bit byte pointers. My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.
    • wglb 6y ago
      Hi. The only place I have seen equivalent instructions are in Common Lisp
    • msla 6y ago
      > And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering. Maybe make a remark about word marks, or decimal machines. Are you sufficiently sputtered yet?
      • 082349872349872 6y ago
        Word marks, as in the Can't Add Doesn't Even Try? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620