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Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

ALGOL is the main forerunner of C. Anything vaguely C-like is also ALGOL-like.

As I understand it, B[1] was the immediate predecessor of C.

Pascal (and its descendants) and Ada (and VHDL) seem closer syntactically to algol 60 than C is (begin/end as block delimiters, no parentheses needed for control structures, := for assignment, etc.) The example code at [1] (using bold keywords) should be understandable to most HN readers 64 years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60

B came from BCPL which came from CPL which came from ALGOL 60. The main thing about ALGOL was structured programming as opposed to goto statements. Compared to that begin/end vs braces is a very minor issue.

For a look at how BCPL developed (by being easily ported to new machines), see: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/BCPL

I always thought BCPL would have been a great language for 80s era micros. Fortunately, we had Turbo Pascal.

But C was better because it incorporated byte addressing (BCPL was based on word addresses).

Except the contemporary C compilers were uniformly terrible.

Indeed. And they're all algol descendants as you note.

But there is certainly a difference between c-like syntax (java, javascript...) vs. algol-like syntax (pascal, ada, ...)

And BCPL means Bootstraping CPL, it was never intended to anything beyond bootstraping the CPL compiler that never came to be, as the project folded.

No, BCPL was Basic CPL. BCPL was created in 1967 after the CPL project ground to a halt in 1966, based on the subset of CPL used in the CPL compiler.

Apparently everyone is wrong on Internet.

> BCPL has been rumored to have originally stood for "Bootstrap Cambridge Programming Language", but CPL was never created since development stopped at BCPL, and the acronym was later reinterpreted for the BCPL book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL

I have seen no evidence of this in papers by Martin Richards, including the earliest BCPL manual or the contemporary papers on CPL by Strachey et al.

The descriptions of how the CPL compiler worked (eg Strachey’s paper on GPM, Richards more recent retrospectives) all talk about writing the compiler in CPL and translating it by hand to macro assembly.

I have not yet managed to look at Richards PhD thesis which contains the first draft description of BCPL, which he sketched after working on the CPL compiler and shortly before moving to MIT where he first implemented BCPL.

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