It's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day too. I remember talking about the 'main program' in Fortran when I was learning. I never thought about it when I saw it in C, other than, ok that's how you pass command line args, which I thought was really clean. I remember TOPS and TSS you had to go rummaging around to get to them. As for your BCPL question, START() was way I learned it. I think I first saw it on the 360s or maybe the 1108; but really never did much it until I saw the first Altos. Clem On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 2:53 PM Lawrence Stewart wrote: > C main programs define “main”. > This also seems to be true of B main programs, according to the > Johnson/Kernighan manual > The 1967 Martin Richards BCPL manual doesn’t explain how programs get > started > The 1974 update from Martin Richards says there should be an OS addendum > that explains this. > The 1974 University of Essex BCPL manual says to use START > The 1979 Parc Alto BCPL manual uses Main and I think that must be > unchanged from 1972. > The AMSTRAD BCPL guide from 1986 uses start() > > > So who started “main” and when? I can’t find an online copy of the Bell > Laboratories BCPL manual (Canaday/Thompson) from 1969 or anything about how > to use BCPL on Multics or CTSS. > > -L > >