He (Lawson) can only point to his paper from 1967 and the fact that in 1964 he was asked to join PL/I team due to his earlier published works on linked lists.
PS
He didn't mention it in his recollections [1], but 1978 paper The Early History and Characteristics of PL/I [2] claims that a paper was produced in October 1965.
Like I have said, PL/I did not have pointers in the beginning, i.e. since 1964 until July 1966.
So I think that this claim about Lawson having invented pointers comes from a misunderstanding. It is likely that Lawson has been the lead developer for adding pointers to PL/I.
Someone has heard this and because the first version of PL/I was developed during 1964, a false conclusion was inferred, i.e. that Lawson had invented pointers in 1964, before Euler.
That conclusion was wrong, because pointers have been added to PL/I much later, not during the initial development.
The paper written by Lawson about using pointers was sent for publication in August 1966, i.e. one month after the official introduction of a new PL/I version with pointers.
Due to the timing of the implementation of a PL/I extension with pointers, a short time after a public debate about how programming languages such as ALGOL must be improved, with most proposals integrated and analyzed in the papers published by Hoare, Wirth and a few others, I believe that it is rather certain that the impulse to add pointers to PL/I was not internal to IBM, but it was caused directly or indirectly by watching this debate.
The paper written by Radin, linked by you, confirms that IBM has added pointers to PL/I after an important customer, General Motors, has requested this, presumably in Q4 1965.
Because Lawson was the one who reported the end result of this work of extending PL/I with pointers, I assume that he was the lead developer of this project, which must have happened mostly during the first half of 1966.
As I have said, the only original element of the PL/I pointers was the "->" indirect addressing operator. Unlike in C, no other operator was needed, because PL/I followed the recommendation of Hoare, which was to use pointers only as structure members, where they are useful for implementing linked data structures, and not also as independent variables.
Therefore it seems likely that Harald Lawson was the one who invented the "->" operator.
However, he clearly had not invented pointers, as those (under the alternative name of "references") had been used earlier in the languages CPL and Euler and the implementation of pointers in PL/I done by Lawson followed closely the recommendations made by Hoare in his "Record Handling" paper.
If we start playing the "who was first" game, then for the Soviet machine Kiev (Kyiv), an "address language" with a "prime operation" was created in 1957-59.
The prime operation and address mapping.
The prime operation defines a certain single‑argument function. Its symbol (a prime mark) is written above and to the left of the argument:
'a = b
where a is the argument and b is the result of the operation.
This is read as: "prime a equals b" (or "b is the contents of a").
The argument a is called an address, and the function value b is called the contents of the address.
The prime function ' defines a mapping from the set of addresses A to the set of contents B, which we will call an address mapping.
Pointers and indirect addressing were used in assembly languages and machine languages much earlier than that, perhaps even in some relay-based computers.
In any case, by 1954 already most or all electronic computers used this.
The only priority questions can refer to which are the first high-level programming languages that have used pointers.
In my opinion the first language having pointers with implicit dereferencing was CPL, published in 1963-08, and the first language having pointers with explicit dereferencing was Euler, published completely in 1966-01, but this feature had already been published in 1965-11. The first mainstream programming language, with a large installed base, which had pointers, was the revised IBM PL/I, starting with its version from 1966-07.
Thanks for the link to the book describing the "Kiev" computer. It seems an interesting computer for the year 1957, but it does not have anything to do with the use of pointers in high-level programming languages.
At the page indicated by you there is a description of what appears to be a symbolic assembler. The use of a symbolic assembly language was a great progress at that early date, because many of the first computer programs had been written directly in machine language, or just with a minimal translation, e.g. by using mnemonics instead of numeric opcodes.
However this does not have anything to do with HLL pointers and means to indicate indirect addressing in an assembly language have existed earlier, because they were strictly necessary for any computed that provided indirect addressing in hardware.
In the very first computers, the instructions were also used as pointers, so a program would modify the address field of an instruction, which was equivalent to assigning a new value to a pointer, before re-executing the instruction.
Later, to avoid the re-writing of instructions, both index registers and indirect addressing were introduced. Indirect addressing typically reserved one bit of an address to mark indirection. So when the CPU loaded a word from the memory, if the indirect addressing bit was set, it would interpret the remainder of the word as a new address, from which a new word would be loaded. This would be repeated if the new word also had the indirection bit set.
The assembly languages just had to use some symbol to indicate that the indirection bit must be set, which appears to have been "prime" for "Kiev".
Pity you didn't look a little further, where there was more syntax and semantics...
The concept of a high-level language is, of course, relative, but if, for example, someone considers Forth to be an HLL, then imho, the language/formalism from the book about the Kiev machine was definitely one, and it was described in more detail by its chief architect, Katherine Yushchenko, in a book from 1963:
https://it-history.lib.ru/TEXTS/Adresnoe-programmirovanie_EY...
If you are still interested, you can look at page 35, where there are several examples, including finding the GCD.
"Reference" was the original term used in the languages derived from ALGOL for what is now called "pointer".
The distinction that exists in C++ between "reference" and "pointer" is something very recent. In the past the 2 terms were synonymous.
The term "pointer" was introduced by IBM PL/I in July 1966, where it replaced "reference".
PL/I has introduced many terms that have replaced previously used terms. For example:
reference => pointer
record => structure
process => task
and a few others that I do not remember right now.
"Pointer" and "structure" have become dominant after they have been taken by the C language from PL/I and then C has become extremely popular. Previously "reference" and "record" were more frequently used.
Euler had both an address-of operator, which was prefix "@" and an indirect addressing a.k.a. pointer dereferencing operator, which was a postfix middle dot.
So it had everything that C has, except pointer arithmetic.
Only a subset of the programming languages that have pointers also allow pointer arithmetic, because many believe that whenever address arithmetic is needed only indices shall be used, not pointers, because with indices it is much easier for the compiler to determine the range of addresses that may be accessed.
The original paper is probably behind a paywall. But you can have a look at an excerpt (chapter 2) from the book Virtual Machines (2006) by Iain D. Craig.
Your last link (BCPL history) contains links to a lot of papers (all?) by Martin Richards one of which is (pdf) INTCODE - An Interpretive Machine Code for BCPL which i presume was what "vincent-manis" was referring to in addition to the other papers on BCPL Language/Compiler/Manuals. Seems quite comprehensive, i must say.
We really need to publicize all of Martin Richards' contributions to computer science. He seems to be one of those unsung heroes mentioned everywhere having contributed to Languages/Compilers/VMs/OSes but not that well-known.
From the site;
BCPL—the language and systems built with it—connects the first few generations of computer scientists and software engineers, spanning mainframes to minis to micros. It was driven from the UK, but with a tributary into the heart of US research institutions, where it begat C, the most popular systems programming language of all time.
You had commented before I created a new account, so I will just add that I have never seen Wirth claim that he or his colleagues at ETH were the originators of the idea. Moreover, this idea was already used in Wirth’s “first” language, namely Euler, which he published in 1965 while at Stanford. An even earlier example may be Schorre’s META‑II from 1964 (UCLA).
Regarding the popular opinion here that Pascal was created for educational purposes (only) - implicitly meaning not for building real, large-scale software - Wirth considered these two characteristics equivalent, and in his view one was a necessary condition for the other.
From the summary/abstract of his original publication about Pascal (The Programming Language Pascal) written in 1970 and published in Acta Informatica in 1971:
In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write large programs, emphasis was placed on keeping the number of fundamental concepts reasonably small, on a simple and systematic language structure, and on efficient implementability.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/363332.363344
PS He didn't mention it in his recollections [1], but 1978 paper The Early History and Characteristics of PL/I [2] claims that a paper was produced in October 1965.
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/960118.808389