[TUHS] Harvard's PPL, Polymorphic Programming Language

[Jonathan Gray via TUHS]

On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 04:50:57PM +1000, Jonathan Gray via TUHS wrote:
> On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 05:52:49AM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff via TUHS wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I recently discovered a copy of the PPL "Polymorphic Programming Langauge".
> > https://github.com/PDP-10/harvard-ppl
> > 
> > Even though it seems to have enjoyed over a decade as an educational
> > tool, it seems to have dissapeared almost without a trace.  The
> > Wikipedia page is very sparse.
> > 
> > On topic for TUHS, PPL was ported to Unix and used at "several
> > universities".  Has anyone seen this programming language in the
> > archives?
> 
> tuhs Applications/Usenix_77/ug091377.tar.gz
> h/ppl/ has 66 files, so I won't list them all
> 
> 'PPL Version 7(30)'
> h/ppl/read_me
> 
> 'news for version v.6(13) of ppl'
> h/help/ppl

distrib.note also mentions a terminal mode for it:

'We have rewritten the teletype input routine to allow 3 additional
"modes" of operation, "teco," "ppl," and "ddt."'

tty code is also included