[abbreviation, `Basic Combined Programming
Language') A programming language developed by Martin Richards in
Cambridge in 1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size
of compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It
reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the
language in which the original hello world program was
written. It has been ported to so many different systems that its
creator confesses to having lost count. It has only one data type
(a machine word) which can be used as an integer, a character, a
floating point number, a pointer, or almost anything else,
depending on context. BCPL was a precursor of C, which inherited
some of its features.
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
C n.
1. The third letter of the English alphabet. 2. ASCII
1000011. 3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis
Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement
Unix...