CLU: Reference Manual (1979) [pdf]

Codified Likeness Utility?

All joking aside, my first question when I saw this was "is there a compiler / implementation for this language".

Here's what I found in response to looking for that:

http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/~dcurtis/clu/

http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/CLU.html

Looks like you're in luck if you're running a VAX. Otherwise, I dunno...

edit: OK, there's a CLU2C compiler:

http://woodsheep.jp/clu2c.html

Thanks for sharing it as it forced me to look it up. The Wikipedia article has nice summary and traces its effects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_%28programming_language%29

I knew about some of Liskov's work but didn't know CLU was her precursor to OOP. Among other things. Pretty forward-thinking. I see it as a nice space between Structured Programming and OOP where people wanting some, not all, OOP constructs might be comfortable.

This reminded me the good old days when I was writing a CLU compiler based on the spec found in the russian translation of Liskov's Abstraction and Specification book. :-)

Surprising amount of C/Unix influence in lexical conventions, for 1979. For instance note the character escapes in string literals: \n newline, \177 octal (7.5, p. 25). The text formatter program in the example appendix (IV.2, p. 140) is a miniature troff.

I took 6.170 (software engineering aka small group projects) and 6.035 (build a compiler), both in CLU, at MIT in the 80s. I was a Lisp guy so I didn't want to like CLU, but I remember thinking the exception handling was a win - you declared the exceptions thrown so that the compiler could check that you were handling all the thrown exceptions. Lisp had nothing like this since everything was dynamic and with C it was given that real men did not check return values for errors. I was glad to see them resurface as checked exceptions in Java.

Look generics and exceptions in 1979!

I guess some language designers missed something.