Lambda the Ultimate

The design of BCPL was strongly influenced by the work done jointly by Cam­bridge and London Universities on a language called CPL(Combined Program­ming Language) which was conceived at Cambridge to be the main language to run on the new and powerful Ferranti Atlas computer to be installed back in 1963. Another Atlas computer was installed in London at about the same time and it was decided to make the development of CPL a joint project be­tween Cambridge and London Universities. As a result the name changed from Cambridge Programming Language to Combined Programming Language. It could reasonably be called Christopher's Programming Language in recognition of Christpher Strachey whose bubbling enthusiasm and talent steered the course of its development...

Another problem (that became of particular interest to me) was that the implementation had to move from EDSAC II to the Atlas computer about halfway through the project. The CPL compiler was thus required to be portable.

Martin Richards has been awarded one of the IEEE Computer Society's 2003 Computer Pioneer Awards for pioneering system software portability through the programming language BCPL, widely influential and used in academia and industry for a variety of prominent system software applications.

BCPL is a simple typeless language that was designed in 1966. It was the precursor to Ken Thomson's B, and the two gave rise to C.