[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[George Michaelson]

Bliss. After all, DEC stuck to it either Bliss 32.

On Sun, 9 Mar 2025, 1:47 pm Dan Cross, <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> As I mentioned in the discussion about C, it's easy to look back with
> a modern perspective and cast aspersions on C. But this got me
> thinking, what would possible alternatives have been? In the context
> of the very late 1960s heading into the early 70s, and given the
> constraints of the PDP-7 and early PDP-11s, what languages would one
> consider for implementing a system like early Unix? Dennis's history
> paper mentioned a very short-lived effort at Fortran, and I asked
> about that a few years ago, but no one really remembered much about
> it; I gather this was an experiment that lasted a few days or weeks
> and was quickly abandoned. But what else?
>
> My short list included PL/1, Algol/W, Fortran, and Pascal. Fortran was
> already mentioned. I don't think PL/1 (or PL/I) could have fit on
> those machines. Pascal was really targeted towards teaching and would
> have required pretty extensive work to be usable. The big question
> mark in my mind is Algol/W; how well known was it at the time? Was any
> consideration for it made?
>
> Obviously, the decision to go with BCPL (as the basis for B, which
> beget C) was made and the rest is history. But I'm really curious
> about how, in the research culture at the time, information about new
> programming languages made its way through the community.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
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