The Hidden Gems of Pop-11
This is a repository for a scheduled on-line talk for CodeHub Bristol which will highlight some of the areas of Pop-11 that remain noteworthy in one way or another. If you are interested in our talks or what we do, please join our Discord channel.
The section below was used to advertise the talk - please note that some historical simplifications are made (e.g. no mention of COWSEL) in the interest of making it short and sweet.
The first high-level programming languages were created in 1959-1960 and kick-started a period of explosive experimentation in programming language design. Within six years there was an incredible diversity of languages - FORTRAN, Lisp, Algol-60, COBOL, Simula, SNOBOL and APL. And barely noticed outside of Edinburgh University Dept of Machine Intelligence, Pop-1, the progenitor of the Pop-family of programming languages, arrived.
In this Decodering, I will be talking about its ancestor, Pop-11. Pop-11 is the most evolved and mature member of this fascinating family of languages and in its heyday (1980-1990) it was a significant part of the British AI scene. This family is characterised by its use of an open stack for passing arguments, higher-order functions, garbage collection and Algol-like syntax.
Although Pop-11's star has long since faded, it remains an exceptional accomplishment with many Hidden Gems. In this talk I will be spotlighting some of the features of this amazing language - those that still outstrip today's programming languages or are simply mind-boggling. Anyone who is interested in different approaches to programming languages or just the history of British computing should tune in.