9 Mar
2025
9 Mar
'25
7:37 p.m.
Adding to Brian's remarks.
Both PL/I, which had been adopted by Multics, and BCPL/B were very
familiar. PL/I , even gutted as it had been for Multics, was much too big
to contemplate. BCPL's integration of subscripting and pointers was nice,
as was its closeness to the machine. Typlessness was a drawback: how would
one integrate floating point or characters? Another was the global vector,
like Fortran COMMON.
Algol W was known (to me, at least) only via its publication in CACM. I
don't recall it having been considered. Because Algol W had more concepts
than BCPL,was not as closely matched to machine-level coding, and (I
believe) was equally lacking in separate-compilation facilities, I suspect
it would not have made the cut.
Doug