Talk:CPL

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This is consistent with my understanding of the CPL rumours too. I'm not sure there ever was a complete working CPL compiler. Shame there doesn't seem to much documentary evidence for this stuff. --drj

The story when I was at Cambridge in the late 70s was that the CPL compiler required a silly number of passes and produced one error message: "sorry". Aside: CPL used qua as syntax for casting, which I've always thought to be rather cool. --JohnKozak

Reading the (first page of) the 1963 Barron et al paper I think it is more likely that the word "Combined" in the language name comes from the collaboration and I have changed the article to reflect that. The text from the paper is:

This paper provides an informal description of the main features of CPL, a programming language developed jointly by members of the University Mathematical Laboratory, Cambridge, and the University of London Computer Unit. (CPL is mnemonic for Combined Programming Language.) The object in developing CPL was to produce a language which could be used for all types of problem, numerical and non-numerical, and would allow programmers to exploit all the facilities of a large and powerful computer without having to "escape" into machine code.

What does anyone else think? --drj