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Bliss is Ignorance

Actually it was a very nice language and certainly an improvement over writing system software in assembly language.

Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than addresses of variables.

Used it for a couple of years in the mid '70s before moving on to SAIL.

Oh, I have fond memories of 36-bit byte pointers.

My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

> And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

Maybe make a remark about word marks, or decimal machines.

Are you sufficiently sputtered yet?

Word marks, as in the Can't Add Doesn't Even Try?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

Hi. The only place I have seen equivalent instructions are in Common Lisp

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