The joy of FORTRAN

[Lars Poulsen]

  Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
  or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
  persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
  just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
  the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
  oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
did our technical documentation using Univac's @DOC processor, to a
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
real-time systems on RSX-11M. I missed the @DOC so much that I wrote a
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

[Sn!pe]

Post by Lars Poulsen

Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits ! :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.

COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

Post by The Natural Philosopher
FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

And in COBOL, if you don't want to write COBOL-style arithmetic expressions,
you can say "COMPUTE" followed by a FORTRAN-style expression.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

Well, except for the Burroughs Large systems, of course, where
Algol (in various extended forms) was used both as a systems programming
language (e.g. for the operating system itself) and as an application
language.

Still is.

[Peter Flass]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

Well, except for the Burroughs Large systems, of course, where
Algol (in various extended forms) was used both as a systems programming
language (e.g. for the operating system itself) and as an application
language.
Still is.

Didn’t HP use ALGOL?

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

Well, except for the Burroughs Large systems, of course, where
Algol (in various extended forms) was used both as a systems programming
language (e.g. for the operating system itself) and as an application
language.
Still is.

Didn’t HP use ALGOL?

The HP-3000 systems programming language was called SPL.

I'm not aware of any Algol compilers on HP hardware.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North America
Algol was generally considered the domain of computer science weenies,
while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications in the Real World
[tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).

It didn’t help that Algol-60 had nothing resembling standardized I/O
facilities, whereas these were an integral feature of both Fortran and
COBOL.

This was remedied later in Algol-68, at the cost of adding a lot of
complexity.

This was in the days before POSIX, of course, when every computer system
seemed to do I/O entirely differently. Most of those, um, idiosyncrasies,
have thankfully evaporated.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.

[rbowman]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

[Bob Eager]

Post by rbowman

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++
programming was full of surprises when your program did unexpected
things, PL/I invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming
language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

A colleague of mine wrote a powerful macro processor (which I still use
and maintain). He called it Macro Language One - ML/I. He loved taking the
piss out of IBM.

[rbowman]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by rbowman

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++
programming was full of surprises when your program did unexpected
things, PL/I invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming
language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

A colleague of mine wrote a powerful macro processor (which I still use
and maintain). He called it Macro Language One - ML/I. He loved taking
the piss out of IBM.

Gary Kildall may have been doing that with PL/M, Programming Language for
Microprocessors. It did have some PL/I DNA.

[Bob Eager]

Post by rbowman

Post by Bob Eager

Post by rbowman

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++
programming was full of surprises when your program did unexpected
things, PL/I invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming
language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

A colleague of mine wrote a powerful macro processor (which I still use
and maintain). He called it Macro Language One - ML/I. He loved taking
the piss out of IBM.

Gary Kildall may have been doing that with PL/M, Programming Language
for Microprocessors. It did have some PL/I DNA.

There are also PL-516, PL-11, ...

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by rbowman
Gary Kildall may have been doing that with PL/M, Programming Language for
Microprocessors. It did have some PL/I DNA.

before ms/dos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
there was Seattle computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products
before Seattle computer, there was cp/m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
before developing cp/m, kildall worked on IBM cp/67-cms at npg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Postgraduate_School

(virtual machine) CP67 (precursor to vm370)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP-67
other (virtual machine) history
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:17:39 -1000

Post by Lynn Wheeler

Post by rbowman
Gary Kildall may have been doing that with PL/M, Programming Language for
Microprocessors. It did have some PL/I DNA.

before ms/dos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
there was Seattle computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products
before Seattle computer, there was cp/m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
before developing cp/m, kildall worked on IBM cp/67-cms at npg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Postgraduate_School
(virtual machine) CP67 (precursor to vm370)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP-67
other (virtual machine) history
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda#VMHist

I recall Jeff Gribbin, very keen on CP67.

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by rbowman

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++
programming was full of surprises when your program did unexpected
things, PL/I invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming
language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

A colleague of mine wrote a powerful macro processor (which I still use
and maintain). He called it Macro Language One - ML/I. He loved taking the
piss out of IBM.

What, no m4? :-)

My older projects use a lot of m4. For newer projects I'm using Meson.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by Bob Eager

Post by rbowman

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++
programming was full of surprises when your program did unexpected
things, PL/I invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming
language”

IBM was always so modest. Programming Language One. A Programming
Language.

A colleague of mine wrote a powerful macro processor (which I still use
and maintain). He called it Macro Language One - ML/I. He loved taking
the piss out of IBM.

What, no m4? :-)
My older projects use a lot of m4. For newer projects I'm using Meson.

Better than m4 (IMHO). And it predates m4 by a decade.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.

I had to write one PL/I program in a university CS class. I think
I finally got it to work (unlike my single attempt at Algol).
One thing I noticed was that the compiler was a real resource
hog compared to any other language (except for Assembler G,
go figure) - which was a disincentive to use it on my meager
supply of computer centre funny money.

There are two things a man must do
Before his life is done:
Write two lines of APL
And make the buggers run.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle: The Devil's DP Dictionary

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Post by Charlie Gibbs
So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.

I had to write one PL/I program in a university CS class. I think
I finally got it to work (unlike my single attempt at Algol).
One thing I noticed was that the compiler was a real resource
hog compared to any other language (except for Assembler G,
go figure) - which was a disincentive to use it on my meager
supply of computer centre funny money.

In grad school a couple of my professors let me use their accounts, so I never
ran out of funny money. Needed that funny money to write my dissertation in the
DPS typesetting system on a DEC-10. It was vaguely like runoff/tex system.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:52:11 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <***@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

[]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
supply of computer centre funny money.

I recall a tale of a new recruit at our Dev Shop who, after a week or so,
submitted his program for compile; then later (because it took a bit back
then) came back with the cash in hand and tears in his eyes to his Lead
Programmer (or whatever the title was before we were all Software
Engineers), as his program had failed to compile cleanly. (2 warnings
maybe).

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Kerr-Mudd, John
On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:52:11 GMT
[]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
supply of computer centre funny money.

I recall a tale of a new recruit at our Dev Shop who, after a week or so,
submitted his program for compile; then later (because it took a bit back
then) came back with the cash in hand and tears in his eyes to his Lead
Programmer (or whatever the title was before we were all Software
Engineers), as his program had failed to compile cleanly. (2 warnings
maybe).

You cruel people. You probably sent him out for a bit bucket too.

(At the airport we'd send such people out for a gallon of propwash.)

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.

... there was MIT Project MAC using PL/I to implement MULTICS
https://multicians.org/pl1.html
some refs from above:
http://teampli.net/plisprg.html
https://multicians.org/pl1-raf.html
https://people.csail.mit.edu/saltzer/CTSS/Multics-Documents/G00s/G0080.pdf
https://people.csail.mit.edu/saltzer/CTSS/Multics-Documents/G00s/G0081.pdf
https://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/ldd/system_library_standard/source/bound_pl1_.1.s.archive

MULTICS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics
https://multicians.org/history.html
https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/f7y/f7y.html
https://www.tebatt.net/SAT/COGITATIONS/UPcursorLecture/ProjectMAC.html

something of spinoff, Stratus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS
Stratus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS#Overview
VOS was coded mainly in PL/I with a small amount of assembly language
before it was migrated to ftServer series.[citation needed] As of 1991,
the system was written in PL/I and C, with only 3% in assembly.[10]


topic drift trivia (I was at CSC for much of the 70s): some of the MIT
CTSS/7094 went to Project MAC on the 5th flr to do MULTICS, others went
to the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center on the 4th flr to do virtual
machines, networking, online&performance applications, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Scientific_Center

CSC had wanted 360/50 to modify adding virtual memory, but all the spare
360/50s were going to FAA ATC, so they had to settle for 360/40 to
modify and implemented virtual machine CP40/CMS ... then when 360/67
becomes available standard with virtual memory, CP40/CMS morphs into
CP67/CMS ... precusor to VM370/CMS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)

CTSS RUNOFF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPSET_and_RUNOFF
had been rewritten as "SCRIPT" for CMS. Then in 1969 when three people
at the science center invented GML, GML tag processing was added to
SCRIPT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language

account by one of the GML inventors about the CP67 wide-area network
https://web.archive.org/web/20230402212558/http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/jasis.htm
Actually, the law office application was the original motivation for the
project, something I was allowed to do part-time because of my knowledge
of the user requirements. My real job was to encourage the staffs of the
various scientific centers to make use of the CP-67-based Wide Area
Network that was centered in Cambridge.

Person responsible for CP67 wide-area network:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edson_Hendricks
which morphs into the corporate internal network (larger than
arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime mid/late
80s)

technology also used for the corporate sponsored univ bitnet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

... some of the MIT CTSS/7094 went to Project MAC on the 5th flr to do
MULTICS ...

Let’s see ... “CTSS” (Corbatò et al) stood for “Compatible Time Sharing
System”, the “Compatible” part meant that it could not interfere with
batch workloads run under the IBM-proprietary OS on the same hardware.

Later some hackers at MIT created their own OS for the PDP-10 and named it
“Incompatible Timesharing System” (ITS) as a sort of anti-homage to
CTSS. ;)

(You thought “MULTICS”/“UNICS” (later “UNIX”) was the only pun of its type
to come out of the ferment of OS development in the 1960s?)

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North America
Algol was generally considered the domain of computer science weenies,
while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications in the Real World
[tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).

It didn’t help that Algol-60 had nothing resembling standardized I/O
facilities, whereas these were an integral feature of both Fortran and
COBOL.
This was remedied later in Algol-68, at the cost of adding a lot of
complexity.
This was in the days before POSIX, of course, when every computer system
seemed to do I/O entirely differently. Most of those, um, idiosyncrasies,
have thankfully evaporated.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.

My C++ programs NEVER exhibit surprise! (Well, almost never :-D)

I did a little bit of Algol the first couple years of college, using an
acoustic modem to access some mainframe in Kansas City.

Then they got a PDP machine, and I learned how to use RUNOFF. Typing in ALL
CAPS.

Did a fair amount of FORTRAN, too, include programming a lab system to run
experiments, in grad school.

[Peter Flass]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

Post by The Natural Philosopher
FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

Yes, that’s another feature I forgot. I like this style a lot more than C’s
style, it seems more explicit.

Post by Charlie Gibbs
And in COBOL, if you don't want to write COBOL-style arithmetic expressions,
you can say "COMPUTE" followed by a FORTRAN-style expression.

[rbowman]

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North America
Algol was generally considered the domain of computer science weenies,
while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications in the Real World
[tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...

When I was exposed to FORTRAN in '65 it was considered as another tool in
an engineer's toolbox like a slide rule on steroids. Purdue had invented
the first US 'computer science' department in '62.

[John Levine]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher
If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

Somewhat but see below.

Post by Charlie Gibbs
At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North
America Algol was generally considered the domain of computer
science weenies, while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications
in the Real World [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).

That was certainly my experience.

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by The Natural Philosopher
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

C's data structures came from COBOL via PL/I. COBOL had (has) very powerful
data structures but weak control structures.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

COBOL had (has) very powerful data structures ...

No pointers, no typedefs, no dynamic arrays, no array lower bounds other
than 1, no parametric types ...

[John Levine]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

COBOL had (has) very powerful data structures ...

No pointers, no typedefs, no dynamic arrays, no array lower bounds other
than 1, no parametric types ...

It was 1960. Fortran had arrays of numbers, COBOL had structures including
arrays of structures. If your point is that we have figured stuff out in
the following 60 years, well, yes, we have.

I guess Algol60 had dynamic arrays but no structures which limited how
useful they were. And the call-by-name mistake made implementation very
painful.

[Bob Eager]

Post by John Levine

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

COBOL had (has) very powerful data structures ...

No pointers, no typedefs, no dynamic arrays, no array lower bounds other
than 1, no parametric types ...

It was 1960. Fortran had arrays of numbers, COBOL had structures
including arrays of structures. If your point is that we have figured
stuff out in the following 60 years, well, yes, we have.
I guess Algol60 had dynamic arrays but no structures which limited how
useful they were. And the call-by-name mistake made implementation very
painful.

I like Atlas Autocode; pity it never took off. Algol with the difficult
implementation bits removed. But still powerful.

There are, however, a few implementations of Edinburgh IMP (a close
derivative), and that was used for real stuff, albeit in a limited orbit.
In fact, I have just written a compiler for it, although the target system
is unlikely to excite anyone.

[Peter Flass]

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

PL/I got it’s block structures from ALGOL.

Post by The Natural Philosopher
FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

PL/I got PICTURE from COBOL. I’m really surprised no other language has
picked this up, it’s so handy.

[Louis Krupp]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B, C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

PL/I got it’s block structures from ALGOL.

Post by The Natural Philosopher
FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

PL/I got PICTURE from COBOL. I’m really surprised no other language has
picked this up, it’s so handy.

Unisys ALGOL has PICTURE declarations. The REPLACE statement features
"WITH <PICTURE identifier>" as one of its many options.

Louis

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Peter Flass
PL/I got PICTURE from COBOL. I’m really surprised no other language has
picked this up, it’s so handy.

It’s a dumb idea because it conflates input/output formatting with
internal representation.

[Woozy Song]

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language?  It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B,  C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

[rbowman]

Post by Woozy Song
When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2. I swear as soon as anybody figured
out how to do anything useful with one of his languages Wirth designed a
new, more obscure version.

https://www.modula2.org/tutor/chapter8.php

Chapter 8 - Input/Output
In preparation

That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs that
are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by rbowman
Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2.

It’s in the name: “modular”. Pascal had features like I/O and memory
management as predefined functions/procedures; Modula-2 made them into
library routines that could be implemented in Modula-2 itself.

Why? So that Modula-2 could be used to write an actual operating system
(Medos, for the Lilith workstation), which you couldn’t do in Pascal
alone.

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by rbowman

Post by Woozy Song
When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2. I swear as soon as anybody figured
out how to do anything useful with one of his languages Wirth designed a
new, more obscure version.
https://www.modula2.org/tutor/chapter8.php
Chapter 8 - Input/Output
In preparation
That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs that
are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

Wirth: His name is pronounced "virth" if by reference, and "worth" if by value.

I found the original Pascal to be confining.

[R Daneel Olivaw]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by rbowman

Post by Woozy Song
When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2. I swear as soon as anybody figured
out how to do anything useful with one of his languages Wirth designed a
new, more obscure version.
https://www.modula2.org/tutor/chapter8.php
Chapter 8 - Input/Output
In preparation
That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs that
are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

Wirth: His name is pronounced "virth" if by reference, and "worth" if by value.
I found the original Pascal to be confining.

Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:45 +0200
R Daneel Olivaw <***@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:

[]
[Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
Bottle" from 1977?]

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.

Call the police.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Kerr-Mudd, John
On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:45 +0200
[]
[Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
Bottle" from 1977?]

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.

Call the police.

<snicker>

[R Daneel Olivaw]

Post by Kerr-Mudd, John
On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:45 +0200
[]
[Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
Bottle" from 1977?]

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.

Call the police.

Oh I knew where the quote came from - the sig is

Post by Kerr-Mudd, John
Woke up this morning, don't believe what I saw.
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.
Seems I'm not alone in being alone.
Hundred billion castaways looking for a call.
-- The Police, "Message in a Bottle"

it just struck me that a hundred billion bottles washing up on the shore
has different connotations nowadays.

oh, and that track was released in 1979.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by rbowman

Post by Woozy Song
When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2. I swear as soon as anybody figured
out how to do anything useful with one of his languages Wirth designed a
new, more obscure version.
https://www.modula2.org/tutor/chapter8.php
Chapter 8 - Input/Output
In preparation
That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs that
are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

Wirth: His name is pronounced "virth" if by reference, and "worth" if by value.
I found the original Pascal to be confining.

VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Scott Lurndal
VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

I was at San Jose Research, but doing some amount of work out at Los
Gatos lab and they let me have part of a wing with offices and
lab. They were doing lots of work with "TWS", from Metaware (in santa
cruz) ... and had implemented 370 Pascal which they used for developing
VLSI tools. It was eventually released to customers as VS/Pascal.

I used it to rewrite VM370 spool running in virtual address space and
some number of other VM370 features.

In the early 90s, IBM was going through its troubles and selling off
and/or offloading lots of stuff (real estate, divisions, etc), including
lots of VLSI tools to industry VLSI tools vendor. However, the standard
VLSI shop was SUN machines and so everything had to be ported to SUN.

I had left IBM, but got a contract from Los Gatos to port a 50,000
statement VS/Pascal VLSI design tool to SUN. Ran into all sorts of
problems, it was easy to drop by SUN up the road, but they had
outsourced SUN pascal to a organization on the opposite of the world, so
anything required at least a day's turn around. In retrospect, SUN
pascal seemed to have been used for little else than academic
instruction ... and it would have been easier to have rewritten the
whole thing in C.

[Bob Martin]

Post by Lynn Wheeler

Post by Scott Lurndal
VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

I was at San Jose Research, but doing some amount of work out at Los
Gatos lab and they let me have part of a wing with offices and
lab. They were doing lots of work with "TWS", from Metaware (in santa
cruz) ... and had implemented 370 Pascal which they used for developing
VLSI tools. It was eventually released to customers as VS/Pascal.

The IBM internal version was Pascal/VS

Post by Lynn Wheeler
I used it to rewrite VM370 spool running in virtual address space and
some number of other VM370 features.
In the early 90s, IBM was going through its troubles and selling off
and/or offloading lots of stuff (real estate, divisions, etc), including
lots of VLSI tools to industry VLSI tools vendor. However, the standard
VLSI shop was SUN machines and so everything had to be ported to SUN.
I had left IBM, but got a contract from Los Gatos to port a 50,000
statement VS/Pascal VLSI design tool to SUN. Ran into all sorts of
problems, it was easy to drop by SUN up the road, but they had
outsourced SUN pascal to a organization on the opposite of the world, so
anything required at least a day's turn around. In retrospect, SUN
pascal seemed to have been used for little else than academic
instruction ... and it would have been easier to have rewritten the
whole thing in C.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Bob Martin

Post by Lynn Wheeler
It was eventually released to customers as VS/Pascal.

The IBM internal version was Pascal/VS

It must have taken them all night to come up with that name ...

[Pancho]

Post by Lynn Wheeler
. and it would have been easier to have rewritten the
whole thing in C.

Which is the conclusion most people came to. If only we knew what we
know now, back then.

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Lynn Wheeler
In the early 90s, IBM was going through its troubles and selling off
and/or offloading lots of stuff (real estate, divisions, etc), including
lots of VLSI tools to industry VLSI tools vendor. However, the standard
VLSI shop was SUN machines and so everything had to be ported to SUN.

trivia: 1972, CEO Learson tried (& failed) to block the bureaucrats,
careerists, and MBAs from destroying Watsons' culture/legacy
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/john-boyd-ibm-wild-ducks-lynn-wheeler/

it was greatly accelerated during the failing Future System effort,
Ferguson & Morris, "Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World", Time Books
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Wars-The-Post-IBM-World/dp/1587981394

... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr
of free and vigorous debate was replaced with *SYNCOPHANCY* and *MAKE NO
WAVES* under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in
the shadow of defeat ... But because of the heavy investment of face by
the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrong
headedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during
F/S, outspoken criticism became political

more FS info
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

then 1992, IBM has one of the largest losses in the history of US
companies and was being reorged into the 13 "baby blues" (take-off on
AT&T "baby bells" breakup a decade earlier) in preperation for breakup
https://web.archive.org/web/20101120231857/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977353,00.html
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,977353-1,00.html

we had already left IBM but get a call from the bowels of Armonk asking
if we could help with the company breakup. Before we get started, the
board brings in the former president of Amex as CEO, who (somewhat)
reverses the breakup ... but it was difficult time saving a company that
was on the verge of going under ... IBM somewhat barely surviving as
financial engineering company

[rbowman]

Post by Scott Lurndal
VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

I bought the CP/M version of Turbo Pascal mostly on a whim. "50 bucks --
this I gotta see." iirc it had enough non-standard extensions to be useful
and it was on blazing hell of a lot faster than the BDS C compiler I was
using.

[John Ames]

On 26 Sep 2024 01:32:26 GMT

Post by rbowman
I bought the CP/M version of Turbo Pascal mostly on a whim. "50 bucks
-- this I gotta see." iirc it had enough non-standard extensions to
be useful and it was on blazing hell of a lot faster than the BDS C
compiler I was using.

Yeah, TP was very well-regarded; not without its quirks (ah, RTE 200,)
but one of the first really *decent* programming environments for DOS/
CP/M. Enabled a lotta small independent developers to ply their trade,
back in the day...

[Pancho]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by Chris Ahlstrom

Post by rbowman

Post by Woozy Song
When I went to uni in the 70s, the computer science lecturer had a
hard-on for Pascal, the latest and greatest. Always slipped in snide
remarks about BASIC or COBOL in most classes.

Better Pascal than Modula/Modula-2. I swear as soon as anybody figured
out how to do anything useful with one of his languages Wirth designed a
new, more obscure version.
https://www.modula2.org/tutor/chapter8.php
Chapter 8 - Input/Output
In preparation
That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs that
are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

Wirth: His name is pronounced "virth" if by reference, and "worth" if by value.
I found the original Pascal to be confining.

VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

Indeed, but a bitch to work out how to call Vax C from Vax Pascal, or
vice versa. Life was so much harder before search engines and the internet.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

... a bitch to work out how to call Vax C from Vax Pascal, or
vice versa.

Why would it be that hard? VAX C passed everything by value, while Pascal
let you specify descriptors, references, immediate value ... all the
options.

[Pancho]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

... a bitch to work out how to call Vax C from Vax Pascal, or
vice versa.

Why would it be that hard? VAX C passed everything by value, while Pascal
let you specify descriptors, references, immediate value ... all the
options.

There ware decisions to be made, like what order do you push variables
onto the stack, when do you push the return address, how to interpret a
Pascal String in C. 40 years on I can't remember what the problems were,
just that it took a lot of trial and error.

Some of this might be obvious now, some not obvious. Even things like
the Pascal string data structure were not obvious to me then, possibly
not even mandated in the Pascal Language spec. Now I would guess at
string length being the initial two bytes, back then it was all new to me.

[John Ames]

On 25 Sep 2024 04:38:54 GMT

Post by rbowman
That sums it up. I've heard Wirth's languages described as programs
that are designed to tell secrets to themselves.

That's a marvelous description, although it fails to really capture the
perversity of things like array-size-as-type-distinction; when a man
introduces language features that practically every single third-party
implementor has to provide their own workaround for, you know you've
found a Truly Special Genius.

[Stefan Ram]

Post by John Ames
That's a marvelous description, although it fails to really capture the
perversity of things like array-size-as-type-distinction; when a man
introduces language features that practically every single third-party
implementor has to provide their own workaround for, you know you've
found a Truly Special Genius.

Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip
up TeX back in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of
the crop among his options. You got to put that language in
perspective and see it through the lens of its time!

[John Ames]

On 25 Sep 2024 15:48:01 GMT

Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip up TeX back
in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of the crop among his
options. You got to put that language in perspective and see it
through the lens of its time!

Sorry, nope. Lots of languages from Ye Olden Dayes have their share of
jankiness, but some things are just inexcusably wretched - and treating
arrays of different sizes as distinct types is the most boneheaded,
bass-ackwards solution to the problem of bounds-checking ever devised
by Devil, God, or Man. It *A.* adds compiler complexity only to *B.*
burden the programmer with the same amount of bookkeeping required in
languages without bounds-checking, while *C.* giving *less* flexibility
in the final analysis. Truly masochistic.

[Stefan Ram]

Post by John Ames
Sorry, nope. Lots of languages from Ye Olden Dayes have their share of
jankiness, but some things are just inexcusably wretched - and treating
arrays of different sizes as distinct types is the most boneheaded,

You call C++ "boneheaded"?

|#include <array>
. . .
|::std::array< int, 5 >myArray ={ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };

[John Ames]

On 25 Sep 2024 16:39:24 GMT

Post by Stefan Ram
You call C++ "boneheaded"?
|#include <array>
. . .
|::std::array< int, 5 >myArray ={ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };

I call C++ *lots* of things, not necessarily fit for print ;)

[John Ames]

On 25 Sep 2024 16:39:24 GMT

Post by Stefan Ram
You call C++ "boneheaded"?

(For real: is there *any* case to be made for any solution more complex
than C's arrays-as-raw-pointers, look-ma-no-bounds-checking bare-metal
approach that isn't simply "arrays as intrinsics/objects which known
their own bounds, enabling programmers to iterate over arrays of any
size worry-free?" I'm genuinely curious if someone can put forward a
rationale for anything in-between.)

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

... treating
arrays of different sizes as distinct types is the most boneheaded,
bass-ackwards solution to the problem of bounds-checking ever devised by
Devil, God, or Man.

It works fine if you have parameterized types, as in Ada. I think even
Fortran can manage that now.

[Rich Alderson]

Post by Stefan Ram

Post by John Ames
That's a marvelous description, although it fails to really capture the
perversity of things like array-size-as-type-distinction; when a man
introduces language features that practically every single third-party
implementor has to provide their own workaround for, you know you've
found a Truly Special Genius.

Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip
up TeX back in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of
the crop among his options. You got to put that language in
perspective and see it through the lens of its time!

Pascal was used in the rewrite (2nd version), part of his Literate Programming
thing. The original was written in SAIL (an Algol-60 derivative created at
SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). The same thing was
true of METAFONT, first version in SAIL, second in Pascal. DEK used Pascal
because it was spreading throughout the computing world, across tons of
different architectures. (According to DEK, in his presentation on Literate
Programming at SHARE in San Francisco.)

The thing was, neither was written in "pure Pascal", but rather in his Literate
Programming formulation in which actual Pascal code was intertwined with TeX
documentation for the program being written. The resulting source was then run
through either of two preprocessor programs, tangle (which stripped the Tex and
wrote out a Pascal source without linebreaks or human comfortable indentation)
and weave (which made the Pascal code acceptable to a TeX processor).

Someone else very quickly created C versions of the preprocessors, and the
modern TeX world was born.

[Stefan Ram]

Post by Rich Alderson
because it was spreading throughout the computing world, across tons of
different architectures. (According to DEK, in his presentation on Literate
Programming at SHARE in San Francisco.)

Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote about it in "The design of TEX and
METAFONT: A retrospective" (2005). He explains:

- COBOL was too horrid,
- FORTRAN 66 /was/ portable, but lacked recursion and data structures,
- BLISS was difficult,
- LISP had way too many dialects,
- C had a limited availability at that time,
- PDP-10 assembler was too much locked in with the hardware, and
- SAIL also was tied to the PDP-10.

So Nelson concluded,

|in 1979-1980, when Don and Ignacio produced prototype code
|for the new design, there was really only one possibility:
|PASCAL

.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip up TeX back
in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of the crop among his
options. You got to put that language in perspective and see it
through the lens of its time!

I tried dipping my toes into TEX and LATEX, but could never quite make
sense of it. Too many mysterious warnings or errors, with little or no
idea how to fix them.

Then I tried groff, and got good-quality results with very little work.

Guess which one I prefer to use now.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by John Ames
That's a marvelous description, although it fails to really capture the
perversity of things like array-size-as-type-distinction; when a man
introduces language features that practically every single third-party
implementor has to provide their own workaround for ...

You realize ISO Pascal provided conformant array arguments for this
purpose?

Also, you realize that Wirth did not see Pascal as the last word in
programming languages? That he went on to create others that solved this
and other problems in nicer ways? That the fact that the rest of the world
remained fixated on Pascal for some reason, was not really his problem?

[John Ames]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:27:31 -0000 (UTC)

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
You realize ISO Pascal provided conformant array arguments for this
purpose?

I'm aware! I'm also aware that the ISO standard wasn't even *published*
until 13 years into the life of the language.

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Also, you realize that Wirth did not see Pascal as the last word in
programming languages? That he went on to create others that solved
this and other problems in nicer ways?

I do! But a mind that conceives of such a thing, and not only fails to
immediately scrap it as ridiculous, but actually pushes it through to
implementation and real-world usage, must be considered fundamentally
unsound, even if its owner never does anything more untoward than that.

[rbowman]

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

[R Daneel Olivaw]

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

[Peter Flass]

Post by R Daneel Olivaw

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

C is just pathetic at character strings.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

C is just pathetic at character strings.

FORTRAN was even worse, at least in the bad old days.
Porting Adventure and Dungeon from the PDP-11 to
Univac's 360 workalikes was lots of fun. Not only
were there a lot of DECisms (RAD50 constants, anyone?)
but I had to convert ASCII to EBCDIC (including
decrypting the message file, translating it, and
re-encrypting it). But I _really_ wanted to play
Dungeon, and I didn't have access to a PDP-11...

[rbowman]

FORTRAN was even worse, at least in the bad old days. Porting Adventure
and Dungeon from the PDP-11 to Univac's 360 workalikes was lots of fun.
Not only were there a lot of DECisms (RAD50 constants, anyone?)
but I had to convert ASCII to EBCDIC (including decrypting the message
file, translating it, and re-encrypting it). But I _really_ wanted to
play Dungeon, and I didn't have access to a PDP-11...

I won't name names but when I did an interface to a large US Midwestern
state's criminal justice network the queries and returned data had to be
translated to/from EBCDIC. Their last card reader must have broken a
couple of years ago when they went to a new ASCII API.

[Kerr-Mudd, John]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:52:11 GMT

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by Peter Flass

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

C is just pathetic at character strings.

FORTRAN was even worse, at least in the bad old days.
Porting Adventure and Dungeon from the PDP-11 to
Univac's 360 workalikes was lots of fun. Not only
were there a lot of DECisms (RAD50 constants, anyone?)
but I had to convert ASCII to EBCDIC (including
decrypting the message file, translating it, and
re-encrypting it). But I _really_ wanted to play
Dungeon, and I didn't have access to a PDP-11...

Aha! I think (BMMIIU) first learnt of ASCII from a port of ADVENT into
the IBM world I started in.

N=4E
S=53
E=45
W=57



BMMIIU: ButMyMemoryIsIncreasinglyUnreliable

[Lynn Wheeler]

Post by Charlie Gibbs
FORTRAN was even worse, at least in the bad old days.
Porting Adventure and Dungeon from the PDP-11 to
Univac's 360 workalikes was lots of fun. Not only
were there a lot of DECisms (RAD50 constants, anyone?)
but I had to convert ASCII to EBCDIC (including
decrypting the message file, translating it, and
re-encrypting it). But I _really_ wanted to play
Dungeon, and I didn't have access to a PDP-11...

trivia: 360s were originally suppose to be ascii machines, but the ASCII
unit record machines weren't ready so they were going to (temporarily)
use BCD gear and EBCDIC. biggest computer goof ever:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM

I used to drop by TYMSHARE and/or see them at monthly meetings hosted at
STANFORD SLAC. They had made their CMS-based online computer
conferencing system available "free" to SHARE in Aug1976 as VMSHARE
archvies:
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare

I cut a deal to get monthly tape dump of all VMSHARE (and later PCSHARE)
files to make available on IBM internal network and systems (one
difficulty was lawyers who were concerned that internal employees would
be contaminated exposed to direct/unfiltered customer information.

one visit to TYMSHARE they demo'ed a game (ADVENTURE) that somebody
found on Stanford SAIL PDP10 and ported to CMS. I got full full source
and made it (also) available on on internal network and systems. I
would send source to anybody that could demonstrate they got all the
points. Relatively shortly, versions with lots more points appear as
well as PLI versions.

Colossal Cave Adventure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
Adventure Game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lynn Wheeler
trivia: 360s were originally suppose to be ascii machines, but the ASCII
unit record machines weren't ready so they were going to (temporarily)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513184025/http://www.bobbemer.com/P-BIT.HTM

ASCII and you shall receive.
-- the computer industry

ASCII not, what your machine can do for you.
-- IBM

(quoted from Ted Nelson's _Computer Lib_)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Peter Flass

Post by R Daneel Olivaw

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

C is just pathetic at character strings.

Not really.
They are clearly defined entities and you could construct any routines
to manipualate them you liked

[Chris Ahlstrom]

Post by The Natural Philosopher

Post by Peter Flass

Post by R Daneel Olivaw

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings? Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.

C is just pathetic at character strings.

Not really.
They are clearly defined entities and you could construct any routines
to manipualate them you liked

I agree. Although the GNU gettext C code is pretty damn hairy.

[Dennis Boone]

Post by Chris Ahlstrom
I agree. Although the GNU gettext C code is pretty damn hairy.

I think you included included two two extra words there.
gettext. c.

De

[rbowman]

Post by R Daneel Olivaw
ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL". If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.

Agreed, but that would be a handy operator. I do some GIS programming
where equality close enough for horseshoes or hand grenades is what you
really want so you wind up testing with some arbitrary epsilon value.

[Scott Lurndal]

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

Burroughs/Unisys still use ALGOL in the current generation of
mainframes.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Post by Scott Lurndal

Post by rbowman

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.

Burroughs/Unisys still use ALGOL in the current generation of
mainframes.

Wow!

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Sn!pe
No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language?

There were quite a few Algols. Presumbly you were referring to Algol-60
(so-called because the spec was released in 1960). Before that there was
the “International Algorithmic Language”, IAL or “Algol-58”. And
afterwards came the notorious and controversial Algol-68.

In-between there was something called “Wirth-Hoare Algol” or “Algol-W”.
This is where the record-definition syntax came from that Wirth later
incorporated into Pascal, which spawned several descendants, including
Ada.

Ada is not a dead language, by any means. The current interest in writing
more memory-safe code isn’t just being spearheaded by Rust: Ada was doing
this sort of thing decades ago.

[rbowman]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Ada is not a dead language, by any means. The current interest in
writing more memory-safe code isn’t just being spearheaded by Rust: Ada
was doing this sort of thing decades ago.

Back when the Boston Globe Sunday edition was a source of jobs rather than
LinkedIn I remember ads calling for three years of Ada experience --
before there was a real live working Ada compiler. HR never changes...

[Bob Eager]

Post by Sn!pe

Post by Lars Poulsen

Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN or COBOL. THOSE were the
foundation and persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app just a
couple of years ago - mostly to vex the New Guys. Also a short
COBOL app, that oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits ! :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and
switched to /troff/.

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

The problem with ALGOL was the absence of a defined I/O system.

[Peter Flass]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Sn!pe

Post by Lars Poulsen

Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN or COBOL. THOSE were the
foundation and persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app just a
couple of years ago - mostly to vex the New Guys. Also a short
COBOL app, that oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits ! :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and
switched to /troff/.

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

The problem with ALGOL was the absence of a defined I/O system.

*A* problem.

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Sn!pe

Post by Lars Poulsen

Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits ! :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language? It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

Since I was born and raised in the drizzle of Denmark, the first
computers we were exposed to at College were a couple of GIER
minicomputers, whose primary programming language was Algol-60. They
were built at A/S Regnecentralen, and the compiler team had been led by
none other than Peter Naur himself). The GIER had 1024 words of 42 bits,
plus a drum with 340 tracks of 40 words each, and with this, Naur's team
had built a sort of paging for code segments.
The follow-up system was called the RC4000. It was a much more
conventional system (8-bit bytes, 32-bit words) with an operating system
that was based on a micro-kernel, so one could experiment with own
versions of the higher OS functions. The software team for that was led
by Per Brinch Hansen.

The proliferation of PCs killed the company. They tried building their
own line of PCs, but were too small to make them price competitive with
the IBM compatibles.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

The software team for that was led by Per Brinch Hansen.

Any connection to a system called “THE”, by any chance?

The proliferation of PCs killed the company. They tried building their
own line of PCs, but were too small to make them price competitive with
the IBM compatibles.

That killed a lot of things. Way too many.

By the way, I’ve long thought it should have been called “Microsoft-
compatible”, not “IBM-compatible”. Very early on (1985), a key benchmark
of compatibility was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator.

[Bill Findlay]

Post by Lars Poulsen
The follow-up system was called the RC4000. It was a much more
conventional system (8-bit bytes, 32-bit words) with an operating system
that was based on a micro-kernel, so one could experiment with own
versions of the higher OS functions. The software team for that was led
by Per Brinch Hansen.

Not quite: 12-bit bytes and 24-bit words.

[R Daneel Olivaw]

Post by Bill Findlay

Post by Lars Poulsen
The follow-up system was called the RC4000. It was a much more
conventional system (8-bit bytes, 32-bit words) with an operating system
that was based on a micro-kernel, so one could experiment with own
versions of the higher OS functions. The software team for that was led
by Per Brinch Hansen.

Not quite: 12-bit bytes and 24-bit words.

That sounded really implausible to me so I had a look at
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/regnecentralen/RC_4000_Reference_Manual_Jun69.pdf
section 3.1 Data Formats.

It really *was* 12-bit bytes and 24-bit words, but I see no indication
as to what the character set was. Beyond strange.

[Lars Poulsen]

Post by Bill Findlay

Post by Lars Poulsen
The follow-up system was called the RC4000. It was a much more
conventional system (8-bit bytes, 32-bit words) with an operating system
that was based on a micro-kernel, so one could experiment with own
versions of the higher OS functions. The software team for that was led
by Per Brinch Hansen.

Not quite: 12-bit bytes and 24-bit words.

Thank you for the correction. I should have checked Wikipedia rather
than rely on my aging memory about a system I barely laid hands on.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by Lars Poulsen
Since I was born and raised in the drizzle of Denmark, the first
computers we were exposed to at College were a couple of GIER
minicomputers, whose primary programming language was Algol-60. They
were built at A/S Regnecentralen, and the compiler team had been led by
none other than Peter Naur himself). The GIER had 1024 words of 42 bits,
plus a drum with 340 tracks of 40 words each, and with this, Naur's team
had built a sort of paging for code segments.
The follow-up system was called the RC4000. It was a much more
conventional system (8-bit bytes, 32-bit words) with an operating system
that was based on a micro-kernel, so one could experiment with own
versions of the higher OS functions. The software team for that was led
by Per Brinch Hansen.

Interesting. The first shop where I worked had a Univac 9300 (their
answer to the IBM 360/20). One of the peripherals attached to it was
a paper tape reader that was labeled Regnecentralen RC2000, and I saw
a mention of GIER in the documentation. It was quite a sophisticated
machine, even though it had no tape spooling facilities; you would put
a roll of tape into a compartment, feed the end under a photocell head,
and let the tape spill out the side into a bin that you provided. But
it was fast - it contained a 256-byte core buffer which it would try
to keep half full by varying the speed of the servo motor that drove
the capstan. If the computer pulled data from it fast enough, it
would crank up to 2000 frames per second.

We had one application that did gobble data fast enough to make it
run flat-out. With the tape shooting through the reader at 200
inches per second, it would build up enough of a static charge to
generate a spark that would crash the computer. We tried all sorts
of tricks to suppress the static buildup; what finally worked was
to hang a grounded chain of paper clips where the tape would hit
it on the way out, and even then we had to run a kettle in the
machine room to get the humidity up enough to bleed off the charge.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Lars Poulsen

  Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN or COBOL. THOSE were the
  foundation and persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app just a
  couple of years ago - mostly to vex the New Guys. Also a short
  COBOL app, that oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

I can't remember who originally wrote it, but I came across a version of
'ed' (the standard UNIX editor, none of this visual stuff) written in
FORTRAN.

I made it work on a GEORGE 3 ICL system, and on something else. It was
infinitely superior to the manufacturer's offering.

[Dan Cross]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Lars Poulsen

  Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN or COBOL. THOSE were the
  foundation and persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app just a
  couple of years ago - mostly to vex the New Guys. Also a short
  COBOL app, that oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

I can't remember who originally wrote it, but I came across a version of
'ed' (the standard UNIX editor, none of this visual stuff) written in
FORTRAN.

The first "Software Tools" book by Kernighan and Plauger was
written using "ratfor" as the example language; `ratfor` is a
"rational FORTRAN" frontend that took a semi-structured language
as input and emitted properly-formed FORTRAN code as output.

They implemeneted an ed-like editor in ratfor for Software
Tools. It wouldn't surprise me if the editor you saw was that,
or something derived from it.

Post by Bob Eager
I made it work on a GEORGE 3 ICL system, and on something else. It was
infinitely superior to the manufacturer's offering.

Cool.

- Dan C.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Bob Eager
I can't remember who originally wrote it, but I came across a version of
'ed' (the standard UNIX editor, none of this visual stuff) written in
FORTRAN.

The first "Software Tools" book by Kernighan and Plauger was written
using "ratfor" as the example language; `ratfor` is a "rational FORTRAN"
frontend that took a semi-structured language as input and emitted
properly-formed FORTRAN code as output.
They implemeneted an ed-like editor in ratfor for Software Tools. It
wouldn't surprise me if the editor you saw was that, or something
derived from it.

No, it wasn't really. I implemented the ratfor one (and all the other
tools), but the FORTRAN one I'm talking about looks pretty different.

I still have all the files for the software tools in ratfor publihed by
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

[Dan Cross]

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Bob Eager
I can't remember who originally wrote it, but I came across a version of
'ed' (the standard UNIX editor, none of this visual stuff) written in
FORTRAN.

The first "Software Tools" book by Kernighan and Plauger was written
using "ratfor" as the example language; `ratfor` is a "rational FORTRAN"
frontend that took a semi-structured language as input and emitted
properly-formed FORTRAN code as output.
They implemeneted an ed-like editor in ratfor for Software Tools. It
wouldn't surprise me if the editor you saw was that, or something
derived from it.

No, it wasn't really. I implemented the ratfor one (and all the other
tools), but the FORTRAN one I'm talking about looks pretty different.
I still have all the files for the software tools in ratfor publihed by
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

Huh; curious. I wonder who did it, then.

- Dan C.

[Bob Eager]

Post by Dan Cross

Post by Bob Eager

Post by Bob Eager
I can't remember who originally wrote it, but I came across a version
of 'ed' (the standard UNIX editor, none of this visual stuff) written
in FORTRAN.

The first "Software Tools" book by Kernighan and Plauger was written
using "ratfor" as the example language; `ratfor` is a "rational FORTRAN"
frontend that took a semi-structured language as input and emitted
properly-formed FORTRAN code as output.
They implemeneted an ed-like editor in ratfor for Software Tools. It
wouldn't surprise me if the editor you saw was that, or something
derived from it.

No, it wasn't really. I implemented the ratfor one (and all the other
tools), but the FORTRAN one I'm talking about looks pretty different.
I still have all the files for the software tools in ratfor publihed by
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

Huh; curious. I wonder who did it, then.

Pretty sure it was a colleague. But I can't remember which one.

[R Daneel Olivaw]

Post by Lars Poulsen

   Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
   or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
   persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
   just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
   the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
   oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

I wrote a program which converted @doc to html at one point, that was
probably around 2005. One thing it could not handle was figures, I had
to convert them by hand. It will have been written in @FTN or @ACOB,
using the SYSLIB INFOR$ and SDFI interfaces, I abandoned it when I ran
out of DOC elements to convert.

[Peter Flass]

Post by Lars Poulsen

  Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
  or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
  persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
  just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
  the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
  oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

Isn’t @DOC a lot simpler than troff? A few years ago I wrote a program to
convert some documentation to HTML. I didn’t know @DOC but I learned all I
needed to know from the manual in a half-hour or so. It IS very similar to
products from other vendors, though.

[[e-mail]]

Post by Lars Poulsen

   Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
   or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
   persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
   just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
   the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
   oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

Hey, FORTRAN *will* Get It Done as neatly as most
anything else. If you need many decades worth of
exotic math libs, you'll find them in FORTRAN too.
It is NOT an obsolete language/approach.

For the younger people, note that Python carries
over a lot of FORTRAN ideas, including easy
string-slicing.

If you can do BASIC then you can do FORTRAN, but
does anybody use BASIC anymore ? Intel/IBM did
sell BASCOM ... a BASIC compiler ... and it DID
speed up yer code like by 10X :-)

COBOL ... well ... would rather NOT use it.
The whole "self documenting" idea turned out
to be crap - COBOL is *hard* to understand
sometimes. That's why COBOL programmers can
get really high-pay jobs these days, because
so much of that irreplacable biz software
from the 60s was writ in COBOL. Nobody can
AFFORD to re-write it. It worked, it works,
it was writ by REALLY GOOD narrow-tie Dilberts,
so you just have to MAINTAIN it like forever.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Hey, FORTRAN *will* Get It Done as neatly as most anything else. If
you need many decades worth of exotic math libs, you'll find them in
FORTRAN too.

Not any more. The stuff nowadays is very much usable with other languages,
particularly Python.

[rbowman]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Hey, FORTRAN *will* Get It Done as neatly as most anything else. If you
need many decades worth of exotic math libs, you'll find them in
FORTRAN too.

Not any more. The stuff nowadays is very much usable with other languages,
particularly Python.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/intro-rust-python-extensions/

if you want to jump on the rust wagon.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by ***@ud0s4.net
COBOL ... well ... would rather NOT use it.
The whole "self documenting" idea turned out
to be crap - COBOL is *hard* to understand
sometimes.

Yes, the dream of a language that a manager could read
was rather naive. As Robert L. Glass (under the pseudonym
Miles Benson) once wrote in his column in Computerworld:
"His programs were so readable that he once had one
published in the _Saturday Evening Post_."

But it left a lot of room for humour, e.g. "The Common
Business-Oriented Goldilocks", which tells the story
in COBOL.

I joined a PPOE at the same time as a new department head
who was quite a character. Our inside sales manager,
Al Tannock, popped in and said to him: "Say something
in COBOL." Instantly our guy shot back:

EXAMINE ROOM REPLACING ALL TANNOCKS WITH SPACES.

[[e-mail]]

Post by Charlie Gibbs

Post by ***@ud0s4.net
COBOL ... well ... would rather NOT use it.
The whole "self documenting" idea turned out
to be crap - COBOL is *hard* to understand
sometimes.

Yes, the dream of a language that a manager could read
was rather naive. As Robert L. Glass (under the pseudonym
"His programs were so readable that he once had one
published in the _Saturday Evening Post_."

Heh heh ...

Anyway, great IDEA - but the *realization* was
kind of impossible. A computer language has to
be able to do lots of "computer stuff" and Joe
The Branch Manager is NOT gonna follow that at all.
Just TRYING to make it "accessible" made it all
the LESS accessible.

TOO damned WORDY also ... nearest thing is JavaScript
with aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff.gg(ww.xx.yy(z)) ... 'object'
CAN be carried just TOO far, which is why I tend to
stick pretty close to K&R 'C' ....

BUT ... huge amounts of still-used BIZ/GOVT software was
writ in COBOL. It WORKED, was solid. So, it IS worth
doing a few little apps in it every so often just to
stay aware. These days, few can afford to re-do
What Works in some other lang. Payroll, Scheduling,
vendors, banking ... the nuts-n-bolts stuff.

Those old narrow-tie Dilberts were GOOD at their craft.

Post by Charlie Gibbs
But it left a lot of room for humour, e.g. "The Common
Business-Oriented Goldilocks", which tells the story
in COBOL.
I joined a PPOE at the same time as a new department head
who was quite a character. Our inside sales manager,
Al Tannock, popped in and said to him: "Say something
EXAMINE ROOM REPLACING ALL TANNOCKS WITH SPACES.

Hee, hee, hee ... I wonder if Al got it ? :-)

Of course now - MyString.replace("Tannock"," ") ...
there's "replace_text()" in some FORTRANs that
do the same thing, otherwise it's more ugly.

Hmm ... re-did a number of my fave funcs, mostly
for dealing with ascii-delimited strings/records,
in FORTRAN when I did my last little app to annoy
the new boyz. Gotta dig up that pgm and review.
PICK had "field(str,delim,fldnum)" which I always
found very useful, so that's usually the first thing
i'd move to another lang. Python now has the basic
equiv these days though you can also just split()
and go from there which will be more backwards
compatible.

Oh, one lang I can't stomach - ADA. It's just
SO fascist ...... wrote a few little things in
ADA, including linked-lists of linked-list records,
but that was IT, I was DONE. First off you had
to write translator funs between static and
dynamic strings and use 'em like EVERYWHERE or
you wouldn't get ANYWHERE. Rust isn't the 2nd
coming, despite the fanatics, but it's still a
LOT nicer than ADA. Otherwise IMHO RUST is just
another pointless mini-redo of 'C'. If it LOOKS
kinda like 'C', just use 'C'.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Post by ***@ud0s4.net
Hmm ... re-did a number of my fave funcs, mostly
for dealing with ascii-delimited strings/records,
in FORTRAN when I did my last little app to annoy
the new boyz. Gotta dig up that pgm and review.
PICK had "field(str,delim,fldnum)" which I always
found very useful, so that's usually the first thing
i'd move to another lang.

One of the favourite functions in my library pulls the
next token from a delimited string, but as opposed to
strtok() it does it non-destructively and can handle
empty strings.

Post by ***@ud0s4.net
Oh, one lang I can't stomach - ADA.

What does the Americans with Disabilities Act have to do with
programming? (Hint: "Ada" is not an acronym; the language is
named after Ada Lovelace, reputedly the first programmer.)