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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: PDP-10 addressing, was The Design of Design
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 18:17:28 -0000 (UTC)
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According to MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com>:
>> This was 50 years ago. The system software was mostly written in
>> assembler. Some was written in BLISS which was more concise but still
>> extremely machine specific. 
>
>BLISS reads a LOT like the original K&R C.

Not really, a little more like BCPL, maybe. It didn't have types or
structures. It did have a rather extensive way to define pointer
deferencing which meant it was easy to describe an upper diagonal
array, but clumsy to describe a thing with two ints and a string.

>> There were later versions of BLISS for the PDP=11, Vax and other
>> machines but they were not compatible with each other. 
>
>Imagine if BLISS were machine independent ?!!

Much later DEC came up with versions of BLISS that were similar enough
that you could write fairly portable code, with moderate amounts of
per-machine conditional compilation.  This article is a good summary
of the language and its evolution.

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf

By that time, though, Unix had been ported to lots of machines. BLISS
suffered by its origin on the word-addressed PDP-10, while after its
earliest years people only cared about C on 8-bit byte addressed
machines.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly