Bliss Communications
BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C became popular and common, and BLISS faded into obscurity. When C was in its infancy, a few projects within Bell Labs debated the merits of BLISS vs. C. BLISS is a typeless block-structured programming 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 b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Structured Programming
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of the structured control flow constructs of selection ( if/then/else) and repetition ( while and for), block structures, and subroutines. It emerged in the late 1950s with the appearance of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages, with the latter including support for block structures. Contributing factors to its popularity and widespread acceptance, at first in academia and later among practitioners, include the discovery of what is now known as the structured program theorem in 1966, and the publication of the influential "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming". Structured programming is most frequently used with deviations that allow for clearer programs in some particular cases, such as when exceptio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years. In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin...end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detail ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially wit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
The Design Of An Optimizing Compiler
''The Design of an Optimizing Compiler'' (Elsevier Science Ltd, 1980, ), by William Wulf, Richard K. Johnson, Charles B. Weinstock, Steven O. Hobbs, and Charles Geschke, Charles M. Geschke, was published in 1975 by Elsevier. It describes the BLISS optimizing compiler for the PDP-11, written at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1970s. The compiler ran on a PDP-10 and was one of the first to produce well-optimized code for a minicomputer. Because of its elegant design and the quality of the generated code, the compiler and book remain classics in the compiler field. Although the original book has been out of print for many years, a print on demand version remains available from University Microfilms International. Reception ''Software: Practice and Experience'' said compiling experts would benefit the most with ''The Design of an Optimizing Compiler''. References External links''The Design of an Optimizing Compiler'' - Online version at CMU Computer programming books C ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Optimizing Compiler
In computing, an optimizing compiler is a compiler that tries to minimize or maximize some attributes of an executable computer program. Common requirements are to minimize a program's execution time, memory footprint, storage size, and power consumption (the last three being popular for portable computers). Compiler optimization is generally implemented using a sequence of ''optimizing transformations'', algorithms which take a program and transform it to produce a semantically equivalent output program that uses fewer resources or executes faster. It has been shown that some code optimization problems are NP-complete, or even undecidable. In practice, factors such as the programmer's willingness to wait for the compiler to complete its task place upper limits on the optimizations that a compiler might provide. Optimization is generally a very CPU- and memory-intensive process. In the past, computer memory limitations were also a major factor in limiting which optimizations coul ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language (e.g. assembly language, object code, or machine code) to create an executable program. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman - Second Edition, 2007 There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A ''cross-compiler'' produces code for a different CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A ''bootstrap compiler'' is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimised compiler for a language. Related software include, a program that translates from a low-level language to a h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Goto
GoTo (goto, GOTO, GO TO or other case combinations, depending on the programming language) is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function call normally returns control. The jumped-to locations are usually identified using labels, though some languages use line numbers. At the machine code level, a goto is a form of branch or jump statement, in some cases combined with a stack adjustment. Many languages support the goto statement, and many do not (see § language support). The structured program theorem proved that the goto statement is not necessary to write programs that can be expressed as flow charts; some combination of the three programming constructs of sequence, selection/choice, and repetition/iteration are sufficient for any computation that can be performed by a Turing machine, with the caveat that code duplication and additional variables may need to be introduce ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Macro (computer Science)
In computer programming, a macro (short for "macro instruction"; ) is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input should be mapped to a replacement output. Applying a macro to an input is known as macro expansion. The input and output may be a sequence of lexical tokens or characters, or a syntax tree. Character macros are supported in software applications to make it easy to invoke common command sequences. Token and tree macros are supported in some programming languages to enable code reuse or to extend the language, sometimes for domain-specific languages. Macros are used to make a sequence of computing instructions available to the programmer as a single program statement, making the programming task less tedious and less error-prone. (Thus, they are called "macros" because a "big" block of code can be expanded from a "small" sequence of characters.) Macros often allow positional or keyword parameters that dictate what the conditional assembler program generates ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Coroutine
Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes. Melvin Conway coined the term ''coroutine'' in 1958 when he applied it to the construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963. Comparison with Subroutines Subroutines are special cases of coroutines. When subroutines are invoked, execution begins at the start, and once a subroutine exits, it is finished; an instance of a subroutine only returns once, and does not hold state between invocations. By contrast, coroutines can exit by calling other coroutines, which may later return to the point where they were invoked in the original coroutine; from the coroutine's point of view, it is not exiting but calling a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Exception Handling
In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of ''exceptions'' – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an exception breaks the normal flow of execution and executes a pre-registered ''exception handler''; the details of how this is done depend on whether it is a hardware or software exception and how the software exception is implemented. Exception handling, if provided, is facilitated by specialized programming language constructs, hardware mechanisms like interrupts, or operating system (OS) inter-process communication (IPC) facilities like signals. Some exceptions, especially hardware ones, may be handled so gracefully that execution can resume where it was interrupted. Definition The definition of an exception is based on the observation that each procedure has a precondition, a set of circumstances for which it will terminate "normal ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Structured Programming
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of the structured control flow constructs of selection ( if/then/else) and repetition ( while and for), block structures, and subroutines. It emerged in the late 1950s with the appearance of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages, with the latter including support for block structures. Contributing factors to its popularity and widespread acceptance, at first in academia and later among practitioners, include the discovery of what is now known as the structured program theorem in 1966, and the publication of the influential "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming". Structured programming is most frequently used with deviations that allow for clearer programs in some particular cases, such as when exceptio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Block (programming)
In computer programming, a block or code block or block of code is a lexical structure of source code which is grouped together. Blocks consist of one or more Declaration (computer programming), declarations and Statement (computer science), statements. A programming language that permits the creation of blocks, including blocks Nesting (computing), nested within other blocks, is called a block-structured programming language. Blocks are fundamental to structured programming, where control structures are formed from blocks. Blocks have two functions: to group statements so that they can be treated as one statement, and to define scope (computer science), scopes for name binding, names to distinguish them from the same name used elsewhere. In a block-structured programming language, the objects named in outer blocks are visible inside inner blocks, unless they are Name masking, masked by an Object (computer science), object declared with the same name. History Ideas of block st ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |