[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[Douglas McIlroy]

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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

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[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[Rich Salz]

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On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 1:21 PM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> Though AWK isn't named as BWK's earlier prototype, a --BWK, but after
> AWK's authors, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, who also wrote the book
> ‘The AWK Programming Language’.


Yes, I know that. I was commenting on the similarity between the initials
of one, and the acronym of the three authors and that I never noticed that
before.

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[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Rich,

> > I asked BWK ...
>
> I can't believe that after nearly 40 years I only just now saw the
> similarity between BWK and awk.

Though AWK isn't named as BWK's earlier prototype, a --BWK, but after
AWK's authors, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, who also wrote the book
‘The AWK Programming Language’.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[Rich Salz]

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On Sun, Mar 9, 2025, 8:50 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> I asked BWK ...
>

I can't believe that after nearly 40 years I only just now saw the
similarity between BWK and awk.

>

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[TUHS] Re: BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

Pascal was heavily influenced by Algol/W. From wikipedia:

  ALGOL W served as the basis for the Pascal language, and the
  syntax of ALGOL W will be immediately familiar to anyone with
  Pascal experience. The key differences are improvements to
  record handling in Pascal, and, oddly, the loss of ALGOL W's
  ability to define the length of an array at runtime, which is
  one of Pascal's most-complained-about features.

Algol/w or Pascal, with a few extensions would have been perfectly
fine (& arguably a better choice than C) for implementing an OS.
IMHO.

Algol/W might even have been better but it was perhaps "too big"
for small computers at the time? Pascal was simpler.

Algol/W reference manual:
https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/manual/Eve-AlgolW_Manual-1972.pdf

Looking at it now, it had strings, dynamic data structures, complex
numbers, extended precision numbers, call by name, block expressions
(like gnu CC's { .... ; value }) and so on.

> On Mar 9, 2025, at 5:49 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> I asked BWK if he had any thoughts about possible alternative
> languages. Here is his response, forwarded by permission.
> 
> Arnold
> 
>> Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2025 08:27:57 -0400 (EDT)
>> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk@cs.princeton.edu>
>> To: arnold@skeeve.com
>> cc: crossd@gmail.com, Brian Kernighan <bwk@cs.princeton.edu>
>> Subject: Re: An interesting history question
>> 
>> Dan raises an interesting question.  I don't have a good answer,
>> but there are possibilities.
>> 
>> Typeless languages like BCPL were in the air; Bliss, from CMU in
>> 1970, was a significant example, used mostly on the PDP-10 but it
>> could run on a PDP-11.  It was definitely a contender for doing
>> systems work.
>> 
>> I used MAD in the summer of 1966 at MIT and remembered it as being
>> much nicer than Fortran, though when I looked at a description a
>> while ago, it wasn't clear what the attraction was.
>> 
>> Bell Labs (Doug McIlroy and Bob Morris, mostly) made a PL/I subset
>> called EPL that was at least compilable and a lot easier to manage
>> than the full language.  I don't know whether that would have
>> worked, but it would seem that Ken didn't think so, since he went
>> off on his own direction.  Doug would know more; he sent me some
>> corrective info a month ago, on the errata page here:
>> 
>>   https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html
>> 
>> Fortran would have needed major work to handle non-numeric data.
>> I wrote a text formatter in it by hacking with the Logical*1 type;
>> that let me handle one character at a time by basically lying,
>> though I've long since forgotten the details.
>> 
>> Pascal was hopeless, as I have described elsewhere, though
>> variants that repaired some of the type system might have worked.
>> 
>> The US military used Jovial; it sounds like it's still sort of in
>> use, since it handles the avionics in a lot of planes.  It looks
>> like a direct descendant of Algol 58.
>> 
>> I never used Algol/W, but of all the options, it seems like it
>> might have been the strongest contender.
>> 
>> Xerox PARC had Mesa, but my dim memory is that it was big and
>> complicated, which is the opposite of what was needed at the time.
>> It also came along too late, mid to late 1970s.  It did influence
>> Java and Modula-2, says Wikipedia.
>> 
>> HOPL 1 includes papers on other languages of the time, most of
>> which would not have worked, and/or have died by now.  There's a
>> lot of history, and I have no idea how to get on top of it all.
>> But still interesting to look at and speculate about.
>> 
>> Brian
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, 8 Mar 2025, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Brian.
>>> 
>>> Any thoughts on this?
>>> 
>>> (cc-ing Dan, the original poster)
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> 
>>> Arnold
>>> 
>>>> From: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
>>>> Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2025 22:46:58 -0500
>>>> To: TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
>>>> Subject: [TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?
>>>> 
>>>> As I mentioned in the discussion about C, it's easy to look back with
>>>> a modern perspective and cast aspersions on C. But this got me
>>>> thinking, what would possible alternatives have been? In the context
>>>> of the very late 1960s heading into the early 70s, and given the
>>>> constraints of the PDP-7 and early PDP-11s, what languages would one
>>>> consider for implementing a system like early Unix? Dennis's history
>>>> paper mentioned a very short-lived effort at Fortran, and I asked
>>>> about that a few years ago, but no one really remembered much about
>>>> it; I gather this was an experiment that lasted a few days or weeks
>>>> and was quickly abandoned. But what else?
>>>> 
>>>> My short list included PL/1, Algol/W, Fortran, and Pascal. Fortran was
>>>> already mentioned. I don't think PL/1 (or PL/I) could have fit on
>>>> those machines. Pascal was really targeted towards teaching and would
>>>> have required pretty extensive work to be usable. The big question
>>>> mark in my mind is Algol/W; how well known was it at the time? Was any
>>>> consideration for it made?
>>>> 
>>>> Obviously, the decision to go with BCPL (as the basis for B, which
>>>> beget C) was made and the rest is history. But I'm really curious
>>>> about how, in the research culture at the time, information about new
>>>> programming languages made its way through the community.
>>>> 
>>>>        - Dan C.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>