[Simh] BLISS ( was Re: 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access))

[Timothe Litt]

On 26-Jan-18 11:37, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>> On Jan 25, 2018, at 8:15 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> RSTS Basic is a late entry, the language support for it, originally came from the compiler group which again was originally PDP-10 based (also remember the PDP-11 BLISS compiler needed a 10 to run it).
> Are you talking about BASIC-PLUS-2?  RSTS BASIC-PLUS dates from 1970, and was written under contract for DEC by Evans, Griffiths & Hart ("EGH").  It is essentially a P-code compiler, to use terminology that didn't appear until later; it doesn't generate any machine code.  And as far as I know, it is not based on any BASIC implementation for any other system.
>
> As for BLISS, there's BLISS-16 and BLISS-11.  One came from Carnegie-Mellon; the other was built at DEC.  Both are cross-compilers, but I don't remember which platform.  PDP-10 for both?  10 for one and VAX for the other? 

I wrote a fair bit of BLISS at various stages of its evolution.  My
recollection is:

BLISS-10 & BLISS-11 came from Wulf & Co at CMU.  BLISS-10 is self-hosted.

BLISS-11 is an evolution of BLISS-10.  There was a PDP10-hosted version
of BLISS-11.  I don't think it was ported to VAX.

BLISS-36,-16,-32,-32E,-64E, MIPS, INTEL, IA64, are DEC's common BLISS -
evolved (and greatly extended) from BLISS-11, but not (really)
source-compatible for non-trivial programs.  "common" means that (with
carefully defined exceptions that can be conditionally compiled), the
same language is accepted by all, and it's possible to write portable
programs.  Including common BLISS itself.  RMS-10/20 is another
non-trivial example - same sources as VAX/RMS.  There are a number of
targets and host environment combinations that are supported.

BLISS-16 is hosted on both PDP-10 and VAX, producing PDP-11 object
code.  I used both.  I didn't encounter an Alpha-hosted version - but it
should have compiled & run there, so it probably existed.  Or was VESTed. 

Most software written in BLISS-10 & -11 was converted to common  BLISS.

There was an attempt at self-hosting BLISS-16, but it failed -
technically, it ran, but there really wasn't enough address space to
make it usable.  Cross-compiling wasn't popular (networks were crude),
so BLISS-16 was not as widely adopted.

For a more complete history, see
https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf
<https://www.cs.tufts.edu/%7Enr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf>


> 	paul
>
>

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