The Development of the C Language

Most of the work of my PhD thesis was done in BCPL. I was fluent in that when I switched to it from Pascal in 1985.

I using Pascal (which I'd learned in my undergraduate CS course in 1980) to write a game to play CoNeutron (although it was called Neutron then) for a competition, when I found some bizarre behavior. I tracked down a bug in the compiler and duly reported it. It was ignored, of course (compiler bugs are never compiler bugs, but are always bugs in the users program - didn't you know?) so I made an appointment to see Martin Richards.

I provided a 10 line program that demonstrated the bug, he ran it in the system level debugged, and confirmed it. He then said - "Well, that won't get fixed, why don't you use BCPL instead?" A naive translation into BCPL gained me a factor of 10 in performance, and I was hooked.

Oh, and I won the tournament. Which was nice.

I later "progressed" to C, but still miss BCPL. It had it awkwardnesses, but it had a certain charm.

I always find it amusing that C - the language which pretty much runs everything nowadays - still has broken precedence for the &/&& operators because people didn't want to break backwards compatibility when there were a handful of thousand-line programs written in it...

Just for the record (since I have recently stumbled upon and read up on the BCPL stuff): Martin Richards web site at the University of Cambridge contains valuable resources on BCPL (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/index.html), including (relatively) recently updated manuals.

Reading this I immediately turned to my bookshelf to confirm that my K&R book was still there.