At 13:06 -0500 2000.6.2, Parker, Mike wrote:
>
>Hey! what'd they do with all the '$(' and '$)' symbols?????
>It doesn't even look like BCPL!!!

I first  met BCPL running on Strachey's Modular One at Oxford. 
Although the language was essentially the same as Richard's, the 
syntax was far superior, mainly because Strachey had insisted on 
having teletypes and a line printer that actually supported a 
reasonable character set.

Specifically, the hardware character set included upper and lower 
case letters, three of the four arrows (right for conditional, down 
for indexing), multiply, logical "and" and  "or", a matching pair of 
quotes(!), and four sets of brackets {, [, ( and "Section brackets" 
that were used to delimit code blocks; the open section bracket was a 
double S section symbol (§) and the close section bracket was the 
same thing with a vertical bar running through it.

The full Modular One Internal character code also included a few 
characters that were not on the printers, but which could be produced 
(more or less) by overprinting: divide (÷), $, #, and lambda.

All this was done with 7 bits.  The 8th bit was used to indicate 
underlining.  Just as in many of the contemporary books, we used 
underlining to indicate keywords.  The underscore key on the Olivetti 
teletypes was a "dead" key, like an accent, and you typed the keyword 
let, say, by striking _l_e_t.

The Oxford version of BCPL also included "Manifest Functions", which 
were used to simulate abstract data types, and ... objects.  For 
example, Next[aStream] was a manifest function, i.e., one that could 
be compiled inline; its body was aStream <downarrow> STREAM_NEXT 
[aStream], i.e., apply the function that is stored in the STREAM_NEXT 
(a small integer) element of the aStream vector to aStream itself. 
What this did, of course, depended on the kind of stream that you had 
... sound familiar?

I still have a few listings from those days ...

Incidentally, manifest constants were by convention all caps, and 
words therein were broken by an underlined space (STREAM_NEXT).  All 
other identifiers used studley caps.

For those interested in more reminiscences, The Journal of Higher 
Order and SYmboli Computation has just published a special issue 
commemorating the 25th anniversary of Strachey's death.  It is online 
at  http://www.wkap.nl/sampletoc.htm?1388-3690+13+1/2+2000 (at least, 
that URL is for a "free sample" edition of the Journal, which just 
happened to be the right one when I tried it.)

	Andrew