Talk:BLISS

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I've made some changes to this page and added some additional links. I really don't know what I'm doing so please feel free to fix anything I might have screwed up. Thanks. --Jeff

BLISS was perfectly fine and perfectly unambiguous at "BLISS", and linked to in that form from a bunch of places - unless someone gives me a compelling reason, I'm going to move it back. Stan 20:46, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Stan, the idea would be to eventually be able to automatically produce dynamic lists of prog langs (in fact, if you take a look at the 'Category:Programming languages' page you will see that, for example, the article with the list of prog langs in alphabetical order becomes redundant, and with it go away the problems of keeping it synchronized (which are not trivial). Please detail how the change affects you and I will try to fix it. Thanks in advance for your response. danakil

Um, if all the languages are in the category, then it doesn't matter what the articles are named, just build the list. There is a whole subculture that thinks about this sort of thing (see Wikipedia:Categorization). My personal trend has been to augment lists with piping and annotations that make them useful for readers in a way that categories can't be (for instance, abstracting away the "programming language" appendage that a category listing can't know to filter out), with the future expectation of using a category to check list content. But that's me; there are other WP people who've spent a lot more time thinking about this. Stan 22:13, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Who uses BLISS

Apart from on vms systems, where would i find a bliss compiler or even applications?

Umm, nobody in their right minds? ;-)

Seriously, DEC used it extensively for both VMS systems components (e.g., the filesystem) and for the CUSPs (the utility programs). The VAX 8800 (Nautilus) and 88x0 (Polarstar) consoles were both mostly programmed in BLISS. It was available for PDP-10s and I believe was used by DEC there as well (although I have no direct knowledge of that area.) It was available for PDP-11s as well (as a VMS-based cross-compiler) but aside from the Nautilus Console, I don't know if it was used on PDP-11s.

Outside of DEC, it was used by some DEC customers. The language is presently available somewhere out there on the web.

BLISS's day has definitely come and gone, though. More recent VMS development has all been done in C.

Atlant 13:32, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

But we miss languages with an expression-oriented syntax. Wouldn't C be nice if you could say
"a = {if (b>c) value(d); else value(e);}+f;"
instead of getting just a couple of special purpose operators such as "a=(b>c?d:e)+f;"
Trevor Hanson 05:27, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, BLISS was used for the PDP-10. The operating system (TOPS-10) and many (if not all) system utilities were written in BLISS. I used BLISS to write some user-level code because it offered capabilities not in other available languages. Zubdub 07:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

TOPS-10 which originates in the 1960's predates the availability of BLISS. Also, not "all" system utilities were written in BLISS. There are several externally linked sites which offer data on what was implemented in MACRO-10 and what was implemented in BLISS. patsw (talk) 16:25, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Functional or procedural?

Is this language better characterized as functional? According to the writeup;- "This means that every construct of the language that is not a declaration is an expression". Wouldn't that put it in a similar category to things like Lisp or Haskel? Not proposing original research here , more a query, since its categorization here doesnt track with my understanding of certain terms, and I've never encountered this language in the wild (But no doubt my [dearly departed, RIP] grandfather, who was a Vax coder, would have). Just a query really. Duckmonster (talk) 06:18, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

A functional programming language has functions and function closures as first class values, and includes a syntax for anonymous functions (lambda expressions) that can capture local variable bindings from the surrounding environment. Bliss is no more functional than C. It is an imperative language, even though it is an expression language. 209.183.136.7 (talk) 21:10, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move

BLISS → BLISS (programming language) — Disambiguation between Bliss and BLISS (album). PC78 20:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Survey

Add  # '''Support'''  or  # '''Oppose'''  on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.

Survey - Support votes

1. Support as nominator, unless anyone has a better suggestion. PC78 20:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Changed to BLISS (programming language). PC78 16:53, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

• Support -- With the change, I support the move. I think it's generally a bad idea if we have several topics that are distinguished only by their capitalization. Wiki, like good filesystems, ought to be case-preserving but case-insensitive ;-). Atlant 17:25, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
• Support Zubdub 07:13, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
• Support Trevor Hanson 08:24, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
• Support -- See discussion below. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 05:25, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

Add any additional comments:

I note that we have no consistent way of naming language articles. However, these forms seems the most common: C (programming language), Smalltalk programming language. I don't think we need a new category of names for the purpose of disambiguation. Why not call the new article either BLISS programming language (which already exists as a redirector) or BLISS (programming language)? I would support either; the former usage seems more common, though the latter seems more clear. Trevor Hanson 00:04, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the above, but I prefer BLISS (programming language), unless "programming language" is part of the name. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 09:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I'll change it to BLISS (programming language) if that's what is preferred. PC78 15:46, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually, as I was putting in the support vote, I realized that it should probably be Bliss (programming language) instead. For example, Pascal (programming language) instead of PASCAL, because all-caps is usually made into normal text in article names. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 18:21, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

No, BLISS is an acronym (although there's debate about what it expands to) so uppercase is correct. Atlant 18:23, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

(Note: I moved my comment from here as it doesnt belong in this block....) Duckmonster (talk) 06:18, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Dead link

The link for the large display quote appears dead: http://63.249.85.132/langs/bliss/bliss.pdf . Actually quite a few of the links from this article may be dead [RIP DEC]. Could someone check and see if alternate sources are available?Peter Flass (talk) 13:51, 23 January 2012 (UTC)