Technical reports

A portable BCPL library

John Wilkes

October 1982, 31 pages

DOI: 10.48456/tr-30

Abstract

Too often, programs written in BCPL are difficult to port from one system to another, not because of the language, but because of differences between ‘standard’ libraries. Almost without exception, the definitions of these libraries are loose, woolly and inaccurate – the proposed BCPL standards document being a prime example. The author has developed and implemented a new BCPL library which is explicitly designed to aid the portability of programs between systems. In addition to being largely portable itself, it has two other features of interest: it uses an exception handling system instead of return codes, and it makes no distinction between system and user defined stream handlers. This paper defines the interface to the package.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-30,
  author =	 {Wilkes, John},
  title = 	 {{A portable BCPL library}},
  year = 	 1982,
  month = 	 oct,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-30.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-30},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-30}
}