Lambda the Ultimate

A 2000 retrospective by John Cocke and V. Markstein on the 1970s RISC work at IBM. I was particularly interested at the relationship between chip design, compilers, and programming languages.

There was still the question of higher-level languages. With limited resources, it was decided to concentrate on just one. PL/1 seemed to be a desirable language, since it supported many applications. Its very richness, however, also made it difficult for compilers to produce good code over much of its capability. The construct of PL/1 was therefore reduced to a subset useful to system programmers, and those features which seemed to defy reasonable translation were discarded... The result was the PL.8 language, the ".8" implying that it had about 80 percent of the richness of PL/1.

Originally published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development. The only place I could find to read it without a paywall was, very unhappily, scribd.

[Edit: Mattias Engdegård found a proper pdf.]