BLISS: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie-Mellon by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was the perhaps the best known systems programming language right up until C made its debut a few years later. Since then, C took off and BLISS faded into obscurity. (When C was in its infancy, a few projects within Bell Labs were debating the merits of BLISS vs. C.)

BLISS is a typeless block-structured language based on expressions rather than statements, and includes constructs for exception handling, coroutines, and macros. It does not include a goto statement.

The name is variously said to be short for "Basic Language for Implementation of System Software" or "System Software Implementation Language, Backwards". It was sometimes called "Bill's Language for Implementing System Software", after Bill Wulf.

The original CMU compiler was notable for its extensive use of optimizations, and formed the basis of the classic book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler.

DEC developed and maintained BLISS compilers for the PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX, and used it heavily in-house into the 1980s; the VMS operating system was written in BLISS-32.

Versions

• BLISS-10
• BLISS-11 - a cross compiler for the PDP-11
• BLISS-16
• BLISS-16C - DEC version of BLISS-11
• BLISS-32
• BLISS-36
• Common BLISS - portable subset

• Wulf, W. A.; Russell, D. B.; Habermann, A. N. (1971). BLISS: A Language for Systems Programming. CACM 14(12):780-790, Dec 1971
• Wulf, W. A.; Johnson, R. K.; Weinstock, C. B.; Hobbs, S. O.; Geschke, C. M. (1975). The Design of an Optimizing Compiler. New York: Elsevier.