BCPL

BCPL was designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge for writing compilers for other languages.

Its influence is still felt because the language B, upon which the C programming language was based, was a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL. BCPL was the first of the 'curly bracket programming languages'.

The single-line '//' comments of BCPL, which were not taken up in C, reappeared in C++, and later in C#.

BCPL was a response to difficulties with its predecessor CPL, created during the early 1960s.  Richards created BCPL by "removing those features of the full language which make compilation difficult".

The language is clean, powerful, and portable. It therefore proved possible to write small and simple compilers for it; reputedly some compilers could be run in 16 kilobytes. In addition, the Richards compiler, itself written in BCPL, was easily portable. BCPL was therefore a popular choice for bootstrapping a system.