[TUHS] I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary

Paul Winalski paul.winalski at gmail.com
Sat Mar 11 03:54:21 AEST 2023


On 3/10/23, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> Arnold's observation about trying to be small is reasonable,
> although contemporaries like BLISS did have support. So the comparison
> should really be to BCPL, PL/360, BLISS, *et al*. for features/size
> [although Wulf cheated, the BLISS-11 compiler was not self-hosting and
> needed a PDP-10 to run it].

For what it's worth, BLISS does not have a GOTO expression (BLISS
doesn't have statements per se--everything is an expression and can be
used as a value).

Wulf was studying code optimization.  His BLISS-11 compiler, and its
successor at DEC, BLISS-16, implemented many advanced (for the day)
optimizations.  In the programming environments at CMU and DEC it was
easier to suffer the mild inconvenience of cross-compilation than to
try to shoehorn the compiler into a 16-bit address space.

It certainly would be possible to implement a native BLISS compiler
for the PDP-11, but you'd have to sacrifice either some of the
optimizations or take a big hit in compilation speed.

-Paul W.


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