BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.
Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because the language B, upon which the C programming language was based, was a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL. BCPL was the first curly bracket pr...
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BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.
Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because the language B, upon which the C programming language was based, was a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL. BCPL was the first curly bracket programming language, and the curly brackets survived the syntactical changes and have become a common means of denoting program source code statements. In practice, on limited keyboards of the day, source programs often used the sequences $( and $) in place of the symbols { and }. The single-line '//' comments of BCPL, which were not taken up in C, reappeared in C++, and later in C99.
BCPL was a response to difficulties with its predecessor CPL, created during the early 1960s; Richards created BCPL by "removing those features of the full...
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