This is very cool for those looking to try out and learn a little BCPL for historical reasons, but I don’t think the language has any actual viable use besides its historical notability. Especially as this is touted as the “young persons” guide to BCPL, it’s strange that there’s no mention of why you’d want to learn BCPL, or what it offers for new/young coders that other languages don’t. The only reason given is that its simplicity makes it easy to pick up and learn, which is also true of other scripting languages like Python[1] or Lua (more so, in my opinion). Seems like a very strange choice. Am I missing something?
[1]: Obviously Python isn’t simple in its design or implementation, but it’s simple in that it’s easy for anyone to pick up and understand, for the most part.
Seems like a very strange choice. Am I missing something?
Martin Richards, the author, created BCPL in the 60s. That might be enough to explain why he believes that “BCPL is particularly easy to learn and is thus a good choice as a first programming language”.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, it’s great if he still teaches programming to young people using the language he invented! Many of us have started with some dialect of BASIC, which isn’t exactly better.
Yeah, the fact that this assumes a tabula rasa makes it a little awkward to read. I’m curious about BCPL due to its influence, but I’m having to skip past a lot of both Linux tutorial and platform-specific setup instructions to get to the meat of this.
BCPL obviously isn’t a scripting language. It’s proto-C. It’s a kind of high level assembly language, even more so than C. For example there are no structs, only arrays with constant offset (for which you can use MANIFEST declarations). It’s designed to not have or need a linker – which means the programmer has to manage global storage themselves. The only thing that is not a very good fit to modern machines is it implicitly assumes word addressing, not byte addressing. But that’s not a huge problem. Like early Pascal it assumes that characters are stored in full machine words for processing and supplies special functions to pack and unpack them for more compact storage.
This is very cool for those looking to try out and learn a little BCPL for historical reasons, but I don’t think the language has any actual viable use besides its historical notability. Especially as this is touted as the “young persons” guide to BCPL, it’s strange that there’s no mention of why you’d want to learn BCPL, or what it offers for new/young coders that other languages don’t. The only reason given is that its simplicity makes it easy to pick up and learn, which is also true of other scripting languages like Python[1] or Lua (more so, in my opinion). Seems like a very strange choice. Am I missing something?
[1]: Obviously Python isn’t simple in its design or implementation, but it’s simple in that it’s easy for anyone to pick up and understand, for the most part.
Martin Richards, the author, created BCPL in the 60s. That might be enough to explain why he believes that “BCPL is particularly easy to learn and is thus a good choice as a first programming language”.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, it’s great if he still teaches programming to young people using the language he invented! Many of us have started with some dialect of BASIC, which isn’t exactly better.
Yup, that’s what I missed, lol. Thanks, that makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, the fact that this assumes a tabula rasa makes it a little awkward to read. I’m curious about BCPL due to its influence, but I’m having to skip past a lot of both Linux tutorial and platform-specific setup instructions to get to the meat of this.
BCPL obviously isn’t a scripting language. It’s proto-C. It’s a kind of high level assembly language, even more so than C. For example there are no structs, only arrays with constant offset (for which you can use MANIFEST declarations). It’s designed to not have or need a linker – which means the programmer has to manage global storage themselves. The only thing that is not a very good fit to modern machines is it implicitly assumes word addressing, not byte addressing. But that’s not a huge problem. Like early Pascal it assumes that characters are stored in full machine words for processing and supplies special functions to pack and unpack them for more compact storage.