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

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 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 most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system
• Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the original environment where Alef was developed

References

• Winterbottom, Phil (1995). "Alef Language Reference Manual". Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two. Murray Hill: AT&T. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ref. 
• Flandrena, Bob (1995). "Alef Users' Guide". Plan 9 Programmer's Manual: Volume Two. Murray Hill: AT&T. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/ug. 
• Phil Winterbottom (1992-10-20). "Plan9 VM". comp.os.research. (Web link). 
• TLC Hackers' Hall of Fame