[Simh] BLISS and C

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 1:33 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> PL/I has begin/end as ALGOL does.  I don't know where { } came from, but
> it isn't from PL/I.  What perhaps did come from PL/I is ; as terminator
> rather than separator.


Fair enough, although I will say I had a PL/1 style/dialect compiler from
my IBM days that I thought I remember allowing it - which may have been
BCPL, PL/360 or maybe even PL/C -- too many beers ago.  I was never much of
a PL/1 programmer, and I could easily be mushing it all together.  Most of
my 360 hacking in those days was in assembler.

FYI:  Check out:  http://www.bobbemer.com/BRACES.HTM for an interesting
discussion of curly braces.

I do sort of remember the $( and $) digraphs as IIRC the one of the
keypunch (??19?? I think)  could not create them but the ??26?? could.
Thinking
about it... it may have been that the later was allowed for BEGIN/END in
the PL/x dialect and then later Ken switched from the BCPL digraph to curly
braces.

My point was less on PL/1 and more to the point that Ken had access to BCPL
and did not have BLISS.   But he still decided to create what would become
B.

Clem

ᐧ
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