System programming language

For the HP language of the same name, see Systems Programming Language.

A system programming language is a programming language used for system programming; such languages are designed for writing system software, which usually requires different development approaches when compared with application software. Edsger Dijkstra referred to these languages as machine oriented high order languages, or mohol.^[1]

General-purpose programming languages tend to focus on generic features to allow programs written in the language to use the same code on different platforms. Examples of such languages include ALGOL and Pascal. This generic quality typically comes at the cost of denying direct access to the machine's internal workings, and this often has negative effects on performance.

System languages, in contrast, are designed not for compatibility, but for performance and ease of access to the underlying hardware while still providing high-level programming concepts like structured programming. Examples include ESPOL and SPL, both of which are similar to ALGOL in syntax but tuned to their respective platforms. Others are cross-platform but designed to work close to the hardware, like BLISS, JOVIAL and BCPL.

Some languages straddle the system and application domains, bridging the gap between these uses. The canonical example is C, which is used widely for both system and application programming. Some modern languages also do this such as Rust and Swift.

Features

In contrast with application languages, system programming languages typically offer more-direct access to the physical hardware of the machine: an archetypical system programming language in this sense was BCPL. System programming languages often lack built-in input/output (I/O) facilities because a system-software project usually develops its own I/O mechanisms or builds on basic monitor I/O or screen management facilities. The distinction between languages used for system programming and application programming became blurred over time with the widespread popularity of PL/I, C and Pascal.

History

The earliest system software was written in assembly language primarily because there was no alternative, but also for reasons including efficiency of object code, compilation time, and ease of debugging. Application languages such as FORTRAN were used for system programming, although they usually still required some routines to be written in assembly language.^[2]

Mid-level languages

Mid-level languages "have much of the syntax and facilities of a higher level language, but also provide direct access in the language (as well as providing assembly language) to machine features."^[2] The earliest of these was ESPOL on Burroughs mainframes in about 1960, followed by Niklaus Wirth's PL360 (first written on a Burroughs system as a cross compiler), which had the general syntax of ALGOL 60 but whose statements directly manipulated CPU registers and memory. Other languages in this category include MOL-360 and PL/S.

As an example, a typical PL360 statement is R9 := R8 and R7 shll 8 or R6, signifying that registers 8 and 7 should be and'ed together, the result shifted left 8 bits, the result of that or'ed with the contents of register 6, and the final result placed into register 9.^[3]

Higher-level languages

While PL360 is at the semantic level of assembly language, another kind of system programming language operates at a higher semantic level, but has specific extensions designed to make the language suitable for system programming. An early example of this kind of language is LRLTRAN,^[4] which extended Fortran with features for character and bit manipulation, pointers, and directly addressed jump tables.

Subsequently, languages such as C were developed, where the combination of features was sufficient to write system software, and a compiler could be developed that generated efficient object programs on modest hardware. Such a language generally omits features that cannot be implemented efficiently, and adds a small number of machine-dependent features needed to access specific hardware abilities; inline assembly code, such as C's asm statement, is often used for this purpose. Although many such languages were developed,^[1] C and C++ are the ones which survived.

Major languages

Language	Originator	Birth date	Influenced by	Used for
JOVIAL	System Development Corporation	1960	ALGOL 58	Many systems, mostly military
ESPOL	Burroughs Corporation	1961	ALGOL 60	MCP
PL/I	IBM, SHARE	1964	ALGOL, FORTRAN, some COBOL	Multics
PL/S	IBM	1960's	PL/I	OS/360 and successors
PL360	Niklaus Wirth	1968	ALGOL 60	ALGOL W
Pascal	Niklaus Wirth	1970	ALGOL W	Apollo Computer Aegis, Apple MacApp, UCSD p-System
BLISS	Carnegie Mellon University	1970	ALGOL-PL/I[5]	VMS (portions)
Language for Systems Development (LSD)	R. Daniel Bergeron, et al. (Brown University)	1971	PL/I
C	Dennis Ritchie	1972	BCPL, B	Most operating system kernels, including Unix-like systems
System Programming Language (SPL)	Hewlett-Packard	1972	ALGOL 60, ESPOL	HP 3000 system software, including MPE
NEWP	Burroughs	1970's	ESPOL, ALGOL	MCP
PL.8	IBM	1970's	PL/I	compiler development, AIX (versions 1 and 2 only), IBM mainframe firmware
PL-6	Honeywell, Inc.	1970's	PL/I	CP-6
SYMPL	CDC	1970's	JOVIAL	NOS subsystems, most compilers, FSE editor
C++	Bjarne Stroustrup	1979	C, Simula	GUI applications (Qt, Windows, etc.), games (Unreal Engine)
S3	ICL	1980s	ALGOL 68	ICL VME
Ada	Jean Ichbiah, S. Tucker Taft	1983	ALGOL 68, Pascal, C++, Eiffel	Military,[6] aerospace[7] mass transportation,[8] high-integrity computation, and operating system kernels[9][10][11]
D	Digital Mars	2001	C++
Nim	Andreas Rumpf	2008	Python, Ada, Lisp, Oberon, C++, Modula-3, Object Pascal
Go	Google	2009	Oberon, C, Pascal	Kubernetes, Docker
Mojo	Modular Inc.[12]	2023	C, C++, Python, Rust, Swift, Zig
Rust	Mozilla Research[13]	2010	C++, Haskell, Erlang, Ruby	Servo, Redox OS, Linux kernel
Swift	Apple Inc.	2014	C, Objective-C, D, Rust	macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS app development [a]
Zig	Andrew Kelley	2016	C, C++, LLVM IR, Go, Rust

See also

• Ousterhout's dichotomy
• PreScheme

Notes

1. Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting

References

1. van der Poel, W. L.; Maarssen, L. A., eds. (27–31 August 1973). Machine oriented higher level languages. IFIP Working Conference on Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages (MOHL). Trondheim, Norway: International Federation for Information Processing. Proceedings published 1974.
2. Sammet, Jean (October 1971). "Brief Survey of Languages Used for Systems Implementation". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 6 (9): 1–19. doi:10.1145/942596.807055.
3. Wirth, Niklaus (1968). "PL360, A Programming Language for the 360 Computers". Journal of the ACM. 15 (1): 37–74. doi:10.1145/321439.321442.
4. Mendicino, Sam F.; Hughes, Robert A.; Martin, Jeanne T.; McMahon, Frank H.; Ranelletti, John E.; Zwakenberg, Richard G. (1968). "The LRLTRAN Compiler". Communications of the ACM. 11 (11): 747–755. doi:10.1145/364139.364154.
5. Wulf, W. A.; Russell, D. B.; Haberman, A. N. (December 1971). "BLISS: A Language for Systems Programming". Communications of the ACM. 14 (12): 780–790. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.691.9765. doi:10.1145/362919.362936.
6. "Case Study, BAE Systems Eurofighter Typhoon" (PDF).
7. "What programming languages are used for equipment onboard aircraft?".
8. "TGVweb - the TGV Signaling System".
9. "Ironclad".
10. "M2OS. RTOS with simple tasking support for small microcontrollers".
11. "Jgrivera67/HiRTOS". GitHub.
12. "Modular Inc." www.modular.com. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
13. "Mozilla Research Projects". Archived from the original on 2014-01-04.

External links

• Corbató, Fernando (1969-05-06). "PL/I as a Tool for System Programming". Datamation: 68–76. Archived from the original on 2012-09-21. Retrieved 2012-01-23.