Welcome to the Dictionary of Programming Languages, a compendium of computer coding methods assembled to provide information and aid your appreciation for computer science history.

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BLISS

Language type:

S - block-structured

Description:

Bliss was a low-level procedural language developed and used by Digital Equipment Corp. for system programming. Widely used by DEC in development of OS software and tools for PDP, DECsystem, and VAX lines of computers roughly 1971-1988. No longer widely used.
Bliss supported various datatypes, but did not enforce strong type checking. It had a very powerful macro system that was heavily used in system coding, but which made crafting a compiler for the language more difficult. Because it was intended as a system programming language, it had features that allowed the programmer to do what is taught in the 1990s as the compiler's job: register allocation, data structure packing definition, etc.

Origin:

Wulf, Russell et al, DEC, 1970?

See Also:

C   

Remarks:

For the most part, BLISS was available only as a commercial product from DEC. There was one free compiler for the PDP-10, and DEC later released a BLISS-32 compiler to customers as an OpenVMS add-on.
Research on BLISS was done at DEC and at CMU.
Because BLISS's useful lifetime does not intersect that of the WWW, it seems that very little information is available.

Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some examples copyright of their respective authors. Some technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.

Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com