BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie-Mellon by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known systems programming language right up until C programming language made its debut a few years later. Since then, C took off and BLISS faded into obscurity. (When C was in its infancy, a few projects within Bell Labs were debating the merits of BLISS vs. C.)

BLISS is a typeless block-structured language based on expressions rather than statements, and includes constructs for exception handling, Coroutines, and macros. It does not include a goto statement.

The name is variously said to be short for Basic Language for Implementation of System Software or System Software Implementation Language, Backwards . It was sometimes called Bill s Language for Implementing System Software , after Bill Wulf.

The original CMU Compiler was notable for its extensive use of compiler optimizations, and formed the basis of the classic book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler .

Digital Equipment Corporation developed and maintained BLISS compilers for the PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX, and used it heavily in-house into the 1980s; most of the utility programs for the Virtual Memory System operating system were written in BLISS-32.

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