Talk:System programming language

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This page is largely redundant with Ousterhout's dichotomy. One of these should be assimilated into the other. --FOo 03:13, 4 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

The concept of "system programming language" was around long before Ousterhout - I remember discussing the concept in 1981, and there was a minor industry in system programming languages before C came to dominate. "Ousterhout's dichotomy" could be redirected to reinvention of the wheel :-), or just cut down to say that he made the observation and to explain his viewpoint, while this article focuses just on the history and characteristics of system programming languages. Stan 12:54, 4 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I've added a para explaining the usage of "system programming language" as "a language for system programming" in the sense of system programming. In fact, I feel sure this is the dominant usage, and that the primary definition on this page is wrong. Mhkay 09:37, 13 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The description of scripting languages here is very dubious. They have little or no support for complex data structures? They typically have a lot more support than C, which doesn't even have a native string class. Perl, Ruby, and Python, are full of data-structure support out of the box that you don't have in C. Nor are scripting languages necessarily interpreted. Some are byte-compiled to run on a virtual machine. --OinkOink 05:27, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've now edited the offending paragraph accordingly. --OinkOink 06:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the idea of editing this page to remove material that's redundant with Ousterhout's dichotomy. I've recently expanded that page, so the material on this page is less complete than what's on the other page. This page would be better if it just focused on system programming. And by the way, I'll be the first to admit that both system programming and scripting were around a long time before I started on Tcl; I'm not even sure I'm the first person to have observed the distinction between them. --John Ousterhout 05:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I left the Ousterholt material alone, but agree it should go somewhere else. I added some material on the history of system programming languages, viewing them as being in 3 phases: first, assemblers with high-level syntax, second, general languages with `system programming' extensions (re LRLTRAN: only in Fortran IV could character processing be considered system programming; their point was they wanted to write compilers in it); and third, reduced high-level languages optimized for systems tasks (namely BCPL and C). I left the early discussion of BCPL alone, deciding it would be better to remove the scripting material and then rework the flow. Other things that could be mentioned in the article: ESPOL (Burroughs Algol, useful for writing systems software because the hardware (B5000 and successors) was already high-level; PL/S, IBM's PL/I-like language in which chunks of MVS and similar OSes was written; EPL and then PL/I, in which Multics was written; and PL/M. Vmanis (talk) 20:27, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of languages

I agree with the comment by vmanis. I added a somewhat idiosyncratic list of what I consider "major" system programming languages, leaving aside languages like PL/P, PL-6, npl (pretty much an extension of ESPOL?). The list is more or less in chronological order. Other people may have other thoughts on what's "major." Peter Flass (talk) 19:00, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]