Bliss

BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known systems programming language right up until C made its debut a few years later. more...

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Since then, C took off and BLISS faded into obscurity. When C was in its infancy, a few projects within Bell Labs were debating the merits of BLISS vs. C.

BLISS is a typeless block-structured language based on expressions rather than statements, and includes constructs for exception handling, coroutines, and macros. It does not include a goto statement.

The name is variously said to be short for "Basic Language for Implementation of System Software" or "System Software Implementation Language, Backwards". It was sometimes called "Bill's Language for Implementing System Software", after Bill Wulf.

The original Carnegie Mellon compiler was notable for its extensive use of optimizations, and formed the basis of the classic book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler.

DEC developed and maintained BLISS compilers for the PDP-10, PDP-11, DEC Alpha, Intel IA-64, and VAX, and used it heavily in-house into the 1980s; most of the utility programs for the VMS operating system were written in BLISS-32.

Language description

The following explanation is taken from the Bliss Language Manual (caution; file is 968K) published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1987:

The BLISS language has the following characteristics:

All constants are full word for the machine being used, e.g. on a 16-bit machine such as the PDP-11, a constant is 16 bits; on a VAX computer, constants are 32 bits, and on a PDP-10, a constant is 36 bits.;

A reference to a variable is always to the address of that variable. For example, the instruction Z+8 refers to adding 8 to the address of Z, not to its value. If one needs to add 8 to the value of Z, one must prefix the variable with a period; so one would type .Z+8 to perform this function, which adds 8 to the contents of Z.;

Assignment is done with the standard = symbol, e.g. Z=8 – which says to create a full-word constant containing 8, and store it in the location whose address corresponds to that of Z. So, you can do something like Z+12=14 (or, alternatively 12+Z=14) which places the constant 14 into the address which is 12 words more than the address of Z. (This is considered bad practice.);

Block statements are similar to those of ALGOL: a block is started with a BEGIN statement and terminated with END. As with ALGOL, statements are terminated with the semicolon (";"). When a value is computed, it is saved until the next statement terminator – which means that a value can be computed, assigned to a variable, and carried forward to the next statement, if desired. Alternatively, an open parenthesis may be used to begin a block, with the close parenthesis used to close the block. When parentheses are included in an expression, the standard precedence rules are used, in which parenthesized expressions are computed first,;

Read more at Wikipedia.org