Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • initialism computing Basic Combined Programming Language, a programming language of the 1960s intended for writing compilers and on which the later language C was based.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Never mind C# and C++, to me even C is over-typed; I grew up with BCPL, which is typeless or, if you like, it has one type, the word; or, if you really like, it has an infinite number of types, just no coercion.

    Tooling Around 2006

  • The few programs that assigned new values to an array name to adjust its origin-possible in B and BCPL, meaningless in C-were easily repaired.

    eightface uberfeed 2008

  • Wendie Old, Who was a BCPL librarian years ago when he performed at my library branch.

    Sesame Street Still Vital? fusenumber8 2007

  • MUD1 hard-coded most of the physics of the game in BCPL (a forerunner of C), but defined the world objects and non-general verbs in a data file using a language of Roy Trubshaw's design called MUDDL ("Multi-User Dungeon Definition Language").

    Guess My Game 2006

  • If I wanted to do anything more sophisticated, I'd have had to code it in BCPL rather than MUDDL, which would have meant that it was there for all users of the game engine, not just me other people had written games in MUDDL too, eg.

    Guess My Game 2006

  • Once Thompson and Ritchie discovered BCPL, they decided to use it for writing Unix: to do so they squeezed it into 8 kilobytes and renamed it B.

    The Guardian World News Martin Campbell-Kelly 2011

  • Finally, a new and improved version was developed and named C, which, Ritchie mused, "left open the question whether the name represented a progression through the alphabet or through the letters BCPL".

    The Guardian World News Martin Campbell-Kelly 2011

  • There he designed a simpler version of the language for systems implementation, BCPL Basic CPL.

    The Guardian World News Martin Campbell-Kelly 2011

  • Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson's wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s.

    CNN.com 2011

  • Ritchie didn't invent the curly-bracket syntax-that came from Martin Richards' BCPL.

    Wired Top Stories Ars Technica 2011

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