4 ms·

Oh dear gods no. I first encountered BCPL when I was at Cambridge University, the home of the language and its designer, Martin Richards. Same. I was taught

by jlees 17y ago

Oh dear gods no. I first encountered BCPL when I was at Cambridge University, the home of the language and its designer, Martin Richards. Same. I was taught this during my undergrad (in the ancient times of 2002-3ish). A course on "Comparative Programming Languages" ended up as 7 lectures on BCPL and 1 on everything else (Lisp, Smalltalk, stuff like that. I think.) It was terrible. I now have an in-built knee-jerk reaction to hate BCPL. Especially since he (Martin Richards, who should never be allowed to lecture, ever) spent at least one lecture teaching us how to implement types in BCPL. Yeah. Typed BCPL. Last time I checked, that was called "C".

jacquesm 17y ago
That's absolutely amazing, I thought BCPL was long dead. Or rather, it seems that it is long dead but that this particular lecturer can't get off his hobby horse. That's archaeology, not 'comparative programming languages'. It's a bit like going somewhere to study French and getting a course in Latin instead.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
I liked BCPL, and still prefer it to C, but I taught it to myself, and never took lectures from Martin Richards. Most of the computing done for my PhD was done in BCPL. I still have the code somewhere, but I can't convert it to C because it uses co-routines.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  http://www.dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/ http://www.dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/
ajross 17y ago
While I'm sure you understand the distinction, I think a lot of people miss this: When BCPL or B are said to be "untyped", it's not in the same sense as Lisp is dynamically typed. These are languages for word-oriented computers, without byte-addressable memory. Everything the CPU can do is on a single word of the same size, and memory is just an array of them. So it's untyped in the sense that in C you can do math on both integers and pointers, and convert between them. What C added was originally byte orientation, "typing" was just the glue required to make that work (so that e.g. an int was 2 chars on a PDP-11). Only later on were first class arrays and structures added to the "type system", and likewise the space of "pointers to types".
russross 17y ago
I thought maybe it was just me. When I was a postgrad at Cambridge (2003-2006) I supervised for this course a few times, thinking that a course surveying a bunch of interesting languages would be fun. I seem to recall a bit of smalltalk thrown in, but it was mostly BCPL. I walked by Martin Richards' office and noticed a poster announcing a port of BCPL to .NET or some similar abomination. It's time to let it go...

by jlees 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

That's absolutely amazing, I thought BCPL was long dead. Or rather, it seems that it is long dead but that this particular lecturer can't get off his hobby horse. That's archaeology, not 'comparative programming languages'. It's a bit like going somewhere to study French and getting a course in Latin instead.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

I liked BCPL, and still prefer it to C, but I taught it to myself, and never took lectures from Martin Richards. Most of the computing done for my PhD was done in BCPL. I still have the code somewhere, but I can't convert it to C because it uses co-routines.

jacquesm 17y ago
http://www.dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/ http://www.dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/

ajross 17y ago

While I'm sure you understand the distinction, I think a lot of people miss this: When BCPL or B are said to be "untyped", it's not in the same sense as Lisp is dynamically typed. These are languages for word-oriented computers, without byte-addressable memory. Everything the CPU can do is on a single word of the same size, and memory is just an array of them. So it's untyped in the sense that in C you can do math on both integers and pointers, and convert between them. What C added was originally byte orientation, "typing" was just the glue required to make that work (so that e.g. an int was 2 chars on a PDP-11). Only later on were first class arrays and structures added to the "type system", and likewise the space of "pointers to types".

russross 17y ago

I thought maybe it was just me. When I was a postgrad at Cambridge (2003-2006) I supervised for this course a few times, thinking that a course surveying a bunch of interesting languages would be fun. I seem to recall a bit of smalltalk thrown in, but it was mostly BCPL. I walked by Martin Richards' office and noticed a poster announcing a port of BCPL to .NET or some similar abomination. It's time to let it go...