Much of the computational aspect of my PhD was written in BCPL[0], it's nice to see it's still alive and running.

Greybeard story time:

I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."

About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."

So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.

Fun times.

=================

[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.

[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.

[2] http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/coneutron.html

[3] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/CoNeutron.html

[4] https://davidseal.muchloved.com/

[5] https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/1e767638-32b7-4c7b-81c8...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(computer)

BCPL was great. Cambridge Lisp was written in BCPL, and I found BCPL really pleasant to work in.

Information about other implementations of BCPL:

https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/BCPL/