[TUHS] BWK on possible alternative programming languages

[arnold at skeeve.com]

I asked BWK if he had any thoughts about possible alternative
languages. Here is his response, forwarded by permission.

Arnold

> Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2025 08:27:57 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk at cs.princeton.edu>
> To: arnold at skeeve.com
> cc: crossd at gmail.com, Brian Kernighan <bwk at cs.princeton.edu>
> Subject: Re: An interesting history question
>
> Dan raises an interesting question.  I don't have a good answer,
> but there are possibilities.
>
> Typeless languages like BCPL were in the air; Bliss, from CMU in
> 1970, was a significant example, used mostly on the PDP-10 but it
> could run on a PDP-11.  It was definitely a contender for doing
> systems work.
>
> I used MAD in the summer of 1966 at MIT and remembered it as being
> much nicer than Fortran, though when I looked at a description a
> while ago, it wasn't clear what the attraction was.
>
> Bell Labs (Doug McIlroy and Bob Morris, mostly) made a PL/I subset
> called EPL that was at least compilable and a lot easier to manage
> than the full language.  I don't know whether that would have
> worked, but it would seem that Ken didn't think so, since he went
> off on his own direction.  Doug would know more; he sent me some
> corrective info a month ago, on the errata page here:
>
>    https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html
>
> Fortran would have needed major work to handle non-numeric data.
> I wrote a text formatter in it by hacking with the Logical*1 type;
> that let me handle one character at a time by basically lying,
> though I've long since forgotten the details.
>
> Pascal was hopeless, as I have described elsewhere, though
> variants that repaired some of the type system might have worked.
>
> The US military used Jovial; it sounds like it's still sort of in
> use, since it handles the avionics in a lot of planes.  It looks
> like a direct descendant of Algol 58.
>
> I never used Algol/W, but of all the options, it seems like it
> might have been the strongest contender.
>
> Xerox PARC had Mesa, but my dim memory is that it was big and
> complicated, which is the opposite of what was needed at the time.
> It also came along too late, mid to late 1970s.  It did influence
> Java and Modula-2, says Wikipedia.
>
> HOPL 1 includes papers on other languages of the time, most of
> which would not have worked, and/or have died by now.  There's a
> lot of history, and I have no idea how to get on top of it all.
> But still interesting to look at and speculate about.
>
> Brian
>
>
> On Sat, 8 Mar 2025, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Hi Brian.
> >
> > Any thoughts on this?
> >
> > (cc-ing Dan, the original poster)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
> >
> >> From: Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com>
> >> Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2025 22:46:58 -0500
> >> To: TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> >> Subject: [TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >
>