BCPL

BCPL is a programming language that was first developed in the late 1960's. Although little-used nowdays, it is historically important as C is derived from it. (C can be crisply, and aptly, described as 'BCPL with types and terser syntax'.)

Like ALGOL, from which is is descended, it includes modern control flow, including 'block structure'. Unlike Algol, it did not have types; the only type spported was 'word'.

It was intended by Martin Richards, its designer, mostly for systems programming (such as operating systems, compilers, etc), for which the limitation was not severe. (The lack of any support for floating point made it a poor choice for classic computational applications.)

BCPL is based on Combined Programming Language (CPL), an abitious collaboration between Cambridge University and University College London, by a team including Christopher Strachey. BCPL was defined in part as a interim ('Basic CPL') while waiting for CPL to appear (which it never did).

BCPL retains much of the syntactic richness of CPL, but did so while considerably limiting its complexity - which produced a very elegant language.

BCPL was also used in a number of other significant places, including much of the early work on the Xerox Alto.