BCPL for unix

[David Chase]

In my spare time (as a labor of love (for bcpl, not unix)), I am trying to
port BCPL to 4.2.  I am working with Phoenix and a fairly excellent VMS
implementation I received from Robert Firth.  Before I attack this problem
for real, I thought that I should see if anyone else has done it already.

As it stands, I am having problems with the assembler and linker, since
they are (at best) fairly minimal.  Does anyone have any magic tricks for
overlapping initialization of a global array? (I am looking for the effect
of the VMS ".PSECT global, LONG, OVL, NOEXE, GBL" macro/linker directive -
the 4.2 as manual seems to tell me that "." must be non-decreasing).  I am
currently planning the non-magic trick of processing the generated
assembler files with awk to generate a global file, but that is
disgusting.

Are there perhaps any alternate linkers? Ld really sucks for bcpl, and
bcpl doesn't need all those bozo libraries anyway.

David Chase, Rice U