[TUHS] b remnants?

[Gregg Levine]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Michael Davidson
<michael_davidson at pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> --- On Fri, 10/14/11, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What intrigued me about this is that it's such an early example of an
> abstract machine running as an interpreter. BCPL, roughly
> contemporaneous, used ocode as an intermediate language, but it seems
> this was intended to be further translated into assembly. While it's
> possible to interpret ocode, in practice it seems this was rare, if it
> was done at all.
>
> Not sure if anyone ever interpreted ocode - by the time I encountered BCPL in the mid 1970's the "porting kit" consisted of the BCPL compiler along with an ocode to intcode translator, a reference intcode interpreter written in BCPL and of course, the intcode for the compiler. To bootstrap on a new machine you implemented an intcode interpreter - probably in assembler and, initially, ran the intcode version of the compiler until you had implemented an ocode to machine code translator for your system.
>
> All of this is described in the Richards / Whitby-Strevens book.
>
> Michael Davidson
>
>
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Hello!
I just ran a Google search (naturally) using the term BCPL, and found
an interesting set of pages. The Wikipedia page on it contains some
darned interesting things. Take for example the TX0 and TX1 computers.
The PDP-1 descends from one of them.

The first MUD was written using BCPL, which I suspect would be right
down a certain correspondent's alley.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."