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BLISS Dead

BLISS
KindProgramming language
Appeared1970
StatusDead
CreatorW. A. Wulf / Carnegie Mellon & DEC
FamilyALGOL
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

CMU's expression-only systems language — everything returns a value, there is no GOTO, and most of VMS was written in it.

Influenced by ALGOL 68
Created by William Wulf
Things written in it OpenVMS

Wulf's BLISS (1970) — Carnegie Mellon's 'language for systems programming' — was typeless like BCPL but expression-based, macro-driven, and optimizing better than most compilers of its era.\n\nDEC adopted it for the PDP-11 era systems (VMS was written in BLISS-32); the 'expression language' idea influenced C's design.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS