This may be a dead end. Altho the compiler compiles to x86, is does not understand all the BCPL syntax WRT the ALTO operating system.
I am suspending work on this for the time being.
Get a BCPL compiler running so that the xerox parc ALTO operating system code can be compiled in a linux environment.
I downloaded this compiler from bitsaver with the intention of converting it to compile for 68000 or 68020/68030 as running on the S100 bus. See s100computers.com for information on the CPU boards.
Below is the original README from the distro I copied. I will include the Copyright at the end.
8/20/23 An interest point. Code compiled on an X86 based Linux distro with the BCPL compiler, runs on Linux. This should make testing code much faster.
8/20/23 is the starting date of this new project, at this time I am setting up a github repo the allow development to proceed.
Much gratitude to Robert Nordier and Martin Richards for keeping this code alive.
This is an x86 (IA-32) port of the "classic" old BCPL compiler (around 1980) from the Tripos Research Group at Cambridge University.
BCPL was a popular systems programming language during the 1960s and 1970s, and is of great historical importance: about the time of the birth of UNIX, BCPL directly inspired the computer language B and thus had a very big influence on the development of C.
The compiler available here is very close to that featured in the book, BCPL: the language and its compiler by Martin Richards and Colin Whitby-Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
As a real, working computer language implementation, that can be studied, modified, and played with, the classic BCPL compiler has a good deal to recommend it. The compiler frontend consists of only about 2000 lines of BCPL code, and (as supplied here) compiles to a static (fully-linked) x86 binary that is less than 36000 bytes in size.
The present distribution supplies a compiler backend (OCODE to x86 code generator), together with peephole optimizer, and reasonably extensive runtime support. A few revisions have been made to the compiler frontend -- it looks for header files in a standard location, for instance -- and the runtime incorporates support for UNIX command line arguments and error reporting. Some documentation that formed part of the original BCPL distribution tape is also included, as are a few utility programs.
Martin Richards, the originator of BCPL, has a home page at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/
Richards has continued to develop BCPL, very much as though it were still a living language, and has a large and complex distribution of "present day" BCPL available, together with some archive materials.
The web page for this distribution is
http://www.nordier.com/software/obcpl.html
Robert Nordier www.nordier.com
Most of the files here are taken from a BCPL compiler distribution dating from the early 1980s. None of the files bears a copyright notice in the original, but -- on the basis of other files in the distribution -- it seems reasonable to assume that the bulk of these are
(c) Copyright 1978-1980 Tripos Research Group University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Changes and additions are
(c) Copyright 2004, 2012 Robert Nordier
and are freely redistributable.
Robert Nordier www.nordier.com