Alef (programming language)

The Alef programming language was designed by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs as part of the Plan 9 operating system.

In a February 2000 slideshow, Rob Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."

Example

This example was taken from [http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref Alef Language Reference Manual] . The piece illustrates the use of Tuple data type.

(int, byte*, byte) func() { return (10, "hello", ’c’); } void main() { int a; byte* str; byte c; (a, str, c) = func(); }

See also

* Limbo - A direct successor of Alef. The Limbo programming language is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system.
* Plan 9 from Bell Labs - The original environment where Alef was developed.

Trivia

* Alef is purported to be Dennis Ritchie's favorite programming language.

References

* cite book
first = Phil
last = Winterbottom
chapter = Alef Language Reference Manual
title = Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two
publisher = AT&T
location = Murray Hill
date = 1995
chapterurl = http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref
format = HTML
* cite book
first = Bob
last = Flandrena
chapter = Alef Users' Guide
title = Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two
publisher = AT&T
location = Murray Hill
date = 1995
chapterurl = http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ug
format = HTML
* cite newsgroup
author = Phil Winterbottom
title = Plan9 VM
date = 1992-10-20
newsgroup = comp.os.research
id = [e-mail]
url = http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.research/msg/a7dce2f02eb44ffd?&hl=en
* [http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/hackers/bio/bio_02.html TLC Hackers' Hall of Fame]