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History: CPL, the great-grandfather of C

C's ancestry is well known: CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C. BCPL was a success in it's own right, and is well documented. But what was CPL? Until recently, there was almost no information on it on the web (apart from some folkore) . However, a couple of papers on it:
'The main features of CPL' (Barron et al, 1963) and 'The London CPL1 compiler' (Coulouris et al, 1968) are now available due to the recent opening of the older part of Computer Journal's archives.

As well as being an ancestor of C, CPL is interesting as being perhaps the first language widely castigated as 'too big'.

By AlexB at 2010-07-24 12:28 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 6724 reads

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Nice! So are these papers

Nice! So are these papers now freely accessible (I can't tell since I am using a university proxy here)?

By Ehud Lamm at Sun, 2010-07-25 06:39 | login or register to post comments

Seems to be..

Seems to be freely accessible. The downloaded PDF has "Downloaded from ..." message on the right of each page.

By bashyal at Sun, 2010-07-25 14:06 | login or register to post comments

It is interesting to see

It is interesting to see which constructs survived linearly in basically every language in the family, and which disappeared, only to resurface in other languages, not necessarily part of this lineage (horizontal gene transfer, you might call it...).

By Ehud Lamm at Sun, 2010-07-25 06:40 | login or register to post comments

The only concept that

The only concept that survived from CPL to C seems to be the one of making difference between R-values and L-values.

By Boyko Bantchev at Mon, 2010-07-26 21:02 | login or register to post comments

more on C's ancestry

C's ancestry is well known: CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C.

Let's not forget about Algol 68. Its influence on C is somewhat less direct, but by no means less important.

But what was CPL? Until recently, there was almost no information on it on the web (apart from some folkore).

Don't miss the HOSC's Special issue in memory of Christopher Strachey, and in particular Strachey's Fundamental concepts in programming languages.

By Boyko Bantchev at Mon, 2010-07-26 20:55 | login or register to post comments