Alef (programming language)

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The Alef programming language was designed by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs as part of the Plan 9 operating system.

In a February 2000 slideshow, Rob Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."

1 Example
2 See also
3 Trivia
4 References

[edit] Example

This example was taken from [1]. The piece illustrates the use of tuple data type.

(int, byte*, byte) 
func() 
{ 
 return (10, "hello", ’c’); 
}
void 
main() 
{
  int a; 
  byte* str; 
  byte c; 
  (a, str, c) = func(); 
}

[edit] See also

Limbo - The language for Inferno, the direct successor of Alef.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs - The original environment where Alef was developed.

[edit] Trivia

Alef is purported to be Dennis Ritchie's favorite programming language.

[edit] References

Winterbottom, Phil (1995). “Alef Language Reference Manual”, Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two (PDF), Murray Hill: AT&T.
Flandrena, Bob (1995). “Alef Users' Guide”, Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two (PDF), Murray Hill: AT&T.
Phil Winterbottom (October 20, 1992). "Plan9 VM". comp.os.research. (Google Groups).
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