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

[Clem Cole]

ESPOL was basically first, with BCPL, PL/360, and, as George mentioned,
BLISS showing up soon thereafter.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 10:47 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> The big question mark in my mind is Algol/W; how well known was it at the
> time?

Any 360 shop, particularly if it was targeted for teaching students, would
likely have had Wirth's compiler.  Remember, as BCPL was to CPL, PL/360 was
to Algol-W.  Unlike BCPL, I don't know of any port of PL/360 outside of the
IBM world.  Algol-W would later be implemented in C, but that was later
after Wirth tried again with Pascal.


> Was any consideration for it made?
>
Only Ken can answer that.   My guess is that Algol-W would have failed for
the same reasons Pascal ultimately failed.   It really was directed at
students and lacked many of the tools C had.  Many of the issues exposed in
Brian's treatise *"Why is Pascal not my favorite programming language"* also
apply to Algol-W.

At the time, BLISS had the advantage of the first "Green Book" style
optimizer, so in comparison to the original B and later C compilers, their
code generators were almost toys. I believe that the killer for BLISS was
DEC's choice to charge $5K per/cpu and to few places were willing to pay
it. But as Paul points out BLISS was word-oriented, which, from a technical
point of view, made it more difficult to use than C.
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