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Five Little Languages and How They Grew: Talk at HOPL (1993)

Although I have the introductory remarks by the session chair, Brent Hailpern, and also the transcript of the Q&A session that followed, I've omitted these parts. I'll leave the parts others said for the book (which I recommend).

They don't have very fancy control structures, and they perform assignments; they're based on this old, old model of machines that pick up things, do operations, and put them someplace else. `Dereferencing', or turning an address into the value stored in it, happens automatically, according to explicit rules, when appropriate; even though the underlying semantics resemble those Bliss, one doesn't have have to write the dots. Bliss, a goto-less, expression language, with an unusual approach to the meaning of names, partakes heavily of the rationalist spirit, but, like Pascal, was created by the same people who intended to use it.

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