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  • Re: Bliss History

    From John H. Reinhardt@21:1/5 to Robert A. Brooks on Sat Jul 13 16:05:32 2024
    On 7/12/2024 8:30 AM, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
    On 7/12/2024 9:19 AM, Hunter Goatley wrote:

    I had heard eons ago that DEC had a bunch of BLISS compilers: for
    RSTS, for ULTRIX, for Windows. I don't know if they really did, but
    they were certainly never made available outside of DEC,
    unfortunately.

    There were certainly compilers that generated bliss objects for the PDP-11, but they
    were not hosted on a PDP-11; even the mighty, beloved task builder could not make it
    fit.


    An interesting coincidence, I was scanning through my "Downloads" folder, looking for something and came across a file named "bliss.pdf" from Feb 2024. I don't know where I got it, but it was an article "The BLISS programming language: a history by
    Ronald F. Brender" ©2002 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

    In it was this paragraph:

    By the end of 1979, the new generation of self-hosted and highly-language compatible BLISS compilers was firmly established at DEC. We had BLISS-36 targetting and hosted on the PDP-10, BLISS-32 targetting the VAX-11 and hosted on both the PDP-10 and VAX-
    11, and BLISS-16 targetting the PDP-11 and hosted on both the PDP-10 and VAX-11.
    In 1981 an attempt was made to shoe-horn a variant of BLISS-16 onto the PDP-11 using a combination of language subsetting, somewhat simplified code generation, and heavy overlaying. A constraint was that we were not willing to compromise much on code
    quality compared to that available from the BLISS-16 cross-compilers. While the resulting compiler generally worked, it was quite limited in the size of module it could compile, because the 65 Kbyte PDP-11 address space was just too small. The
    compromises were deemed too severe and the experiment was abandoned.

    The whole article (it appears to be a clipping of chapter from a larger work) is quite an interesting discussion of BLISS. If I knew where I had downloaded it from, I'd include the link. Google did not readily find anything.

    Oops. Never mind. A little better diffing found this:

    https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf

    Another quote from near the beginning, guaranteed to make Simon cringe ( :) )

    BLISS is a typeless language; that is, all data is manipulated in terms of the underlying machine word sized units. The word size is usually the same as the integer or general purpose register size, which may be a multiple of the addressable unit size.

    Enjoy...

    --
    John H. Reinhardt

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  • From Lawrence D'Oliveiro@21:1/5 to John H. Reinhardt on Sat Jul 13 23:21:07 2024
    On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 16:05:32 -0500, John H. Reinhardt wrote:

    The whole article (it appears to be a clipping of chapter from a larger
    work) is quite an interesting discussion of BLISS.

    Interesting. TIL that PDP-11 Fortran-IV-Plus was written in BLISS, and cross-compiled from a PDP-10. And that it wasn’t DEC’s first compiler product written in a higher-level language.

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  • From Rich Alderson@21:1/5 to Lawrence D'Oliveiro on Sat Jul 13 20:23:38 2024
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

    On Sat, 13 Jul 2024 16:05:32 -0500, John H. Reinhardt wrote:

    The whole article (it appears to be a clipping of chapter from a larger
    work) is quite an interesting discussion of BLISS.

    Interesting. TIL that PDP-11 Fortran-IV-Plus was written in BLISS, and cross-compiled from a PDP-10. And that it wasn't DEC's first compiler
    product written in a higher-level language.

    In point of fact, DEC's own Fortran-10 compiler (as opposed to the earlier F40 compiler which was provided by an outside vendor) was written in Bliss-10 (which was a CMU implementation of the language, available through DECUS, long before DEC wrote their own Bliss-36 implementation).

    --
    Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
    Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
    omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
    --Galen

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  • From Hunter Goatley@21:1/5 to John H. Reinhardt on Sun Jul 14 23:47:30 2024
    On 7/13/2024 5:05 PM, John H. Reinhardt wrote:

    Oops.  Never mind.  A little better diffing found this:

    https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf

    There's also this article from Wulf, et al, from 1971. It was the
    article that introduced BLISS to the world.

    https://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv.com?BLISS-ARTICLE-PS

    Hunter

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