The original ABC language, Python's predecessor (1991)

Nice find. This looks like the best introduction to the language in the repo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gvanrossum/abc-unix/refs/h...

Extremely cool. Thanks, GvR.

For my own language design I've wanted to introduce some of this ABC syntax back into Python. Mainly for unpacking data and doing index/slice assignments; a lot of beginners seem to get tripped up because assignments in Python use the same syntax as mutations, so maybe it's better to write e.g. `a['b'] = c` like `set b = c in a`, or `update a with {'b': c}`, or ... who knows, exactly.

The year says 91, but it looks like it was recently pushed to github, which is a notable event on its own.

Interesting, seems like Python is a strict improvement over ABC though many things are very similar. The PUT ... IN ... and INSERT ... IN ... syntax looks quite clunky and un-composable, at least the examples never do more than one (high-level) operation per line. Also, I guess GvR's English wasn't that good at the time - it should be have been INTO, right?

Where is the GIL in this?