[Info-vax] BLISS, was: Re: VMS on ARM, was: Re: Small x86-64 servers, PCs

[David Wade]

On 22/03/2021 19:31, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 3/22/2021 2:26 PM, Chris Townley wrote:
>> On 22/03/2021 18:18, John Dallman wrote:
>>> Having read the 1987 BLISS Reference Manual, I agree. Most young
>>> programmers don't want to learn assembly languages, and while BLISS is
>>> not an assembly language, it is - quite deliberately - rather close to
>>> the metal.
>>>
>>> It is similar in intent and capability to BCPL ("Basic" in BCPL has
>>> nothing to do with the BASIC programming language), which uses the same
>>> kinds of data types. However, BCPL feels more like a higher-level
>>> language, while BLISS feels more like assembler. What make me think 
>>> that?
> 
>> Wasn't BCPL the precursor to C?
> 
> The story is that C is based on B and B is based on BCPL.
> 
> It may be the same way that Windows NT is based on VMS. I don't
> know neither B nor BCPL.
> 
> Arne
> 

I did a lot of programming in "B" on a Honeywell L66 and DPS8. Its very 
much a direct pre-cursor to "C". It has most of the control structures 
of "C" and a limited pre-processor. It has the "++var" and "var++" 
operators.


The big difference is that "B" has only a single type, the machine word, 
and vectors of machine words. Arrays are constructed from vectors of 
addresses of vectors...

You can of course store characters, integers, addresses and floating 
point data in these words. You tell "B" how to treat the content of thse 
words by the operators you use. So there are integer and floating point 
operators.

The Honeywell "B" manual is here:-

https://www.thinkage.ca/gcos/expl/b/manu/manu.html

Dave