BCPL Dead
BCPL
KindProgramming language
Appeared1967
StatusDead
CreatorMartin Richards / Cambridge
FamilyBCPL
Sourcewww.cl.cam.ac.uk ↗
Richards' portable systems language — the first C-family syntax with curly braces; Ken Thompson distilled it into B, and B became C.
1960198020002020
Martin Richards's BCPL (1967) was CPL stripped to a bootstrap compiler — one type (the machine word), portable across architectures, and the language Multics was partly written in.\n\nKen Thompson's B stripped it further; Ritchie's C added types. The CPL→BCPL→B→C chain is the systems-language royal line.