Five little languages and how they grew: Dennis Ritchie’s talk at HOPL on the

The author delves into a programming problem involving Graph Theory and nodes representing programming languages and people. They discuss similarities between old languages like Bliss, Pascal, Algol 68, BCPL, and C, which influenced each other despite different purposes. Bliss had unique features like its use of dots to retrieve values and non-portability. Pascal, designed for teaching, shares key concepts with C, despite differences in detail. Algol 68’s formal design and complexity influenced many languages. BCPL, a precursor to C, was portable and pragmatic. The author compares the languages’ interpretations of names in expressions and discusses their distinctive approaches.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hopl.html

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