On 29/12/2023 17:34, moi wrote:
> On 29/12/2023 17:15, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven. All
>> of the power of assembler but with a neat logical way to express the
>> more usual constructs. And local variables on the stack! Wow! clever
>> stuff. Obviously you had to worry about not overwriting the stack
>> return addresses though.
>>
>> We didn't expect to have our bottoms wiped for us by the language.
>
> Gosh, how macho! I bet you are really butch.
>
Are you all right?

You sound a little other planetary.

Perhaps an aspirin and some warm Ovaltine?

--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

― Confucius

On Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:55:51 +0000
Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:

> Maybe also isolating complexity in standard components, standard
> patterns. Why people still use C is a mystery to me.

It depends what for - there are certainly many areas where it used
to be common for which it is now a bad choice but sometimes you really do
need the efficiency of a power tool with no blade guard or cutoff - at
these times you should take extreme care.

I'm coming to rather like python for many purposes, but it does
require discipline. It's generally easy to write nice clean, clear,
intentional code BUT it is also very easy to tinker with the backstage
workings in pretty much arbitrary ways - there's no protection you can
change the methods of any class at runtime, just assign to them. This sort
of malarky comes in very handy when writing test harnesses, injecting mocks
and so forth but it would be a very bad idea in production code and needs
to be documented very clearly.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 29/12/2023 17:55, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 29/12/2023 17:34, moi wrote:
>> On 29/12/2023 17:15, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>>> All of the power of assembler but with a neat logical way to express
>>> the more usual constructs. And local variables on the stack! Wow!
>>> clever stuff. Obviously you had to worry about not overwriting the
>>> stack return addresses though.
>>>
>>> We didn't expect to have our bottoms wiped for us by the language.
>>
>> Gosh, how macho! I bet you are really butch.
>>
> Are you all right?
>
> You sound a little other planetary.
>
> Perhaps an aspirin and some warm Ovaltine?

Is that best a big strong guy who wipes his own bottom can do?

--
Bill F.

On 29/12/2023 23:27, moi wrote:
> On 29/12/2023 17:55, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 29/12/2023 17:34, moi wrote:
>>> On 29/12/2023 17:15, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>>>> All of the power of assembler but with a neat logical way to express
>>>> the more usual constructs. And local variables on the stack! Wow!
>>>> clever stuff. Obviously you had to worry about not overwriting the
>>>> stack return addresses though.
>>>>
>>>> We didn't expect to have our bottoms wiped for us by the language.
>>>
>>> Gosh, how macho! I bet you are really butch.
>>>
>> Are you all right?
>>
>> You sound a little other planetary.
>>
>> Perhaps an aspirin and some warm Ovaltine?
>
>
> Is that best a big strong guy who wipes his own bottom can do?
>

I don't understand what this 'best' is all about.
Are you fighting some sort of imaginary war?

I think you need help.

--
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of
conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which
they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by
thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

― Leo Tolstoy

On 2023-12-28 13:07, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> Yes, but in fact a whole swathe of NEW errors become possible, instead :-)

Interinsting - what new error do you have in mind?

> I am very dubious about languages that claim to solve coding problems.

If you refer to Ada/Spark, then they do not claim they solve cding problems.
What they do is they provide tools to write a program with
higher probability to be correct, according to spec.

If you have no spec, then of course nothing or everything is correct.

It is not about the fool-proof language. It is about
to *make it easy to do it right*

It should be easy to do it right. It should be hard to do it wrong.

These tools/languagees helps extremly much to make it right.
Once the code passes the compiler - the hard part - then it usually
works as intended. Of ourse not always, but mots of the times.
I've never had that feeling with other languaes. Ever.
They compile, and bail out on SIGSEGV of SIGABORT or even worse,
they rather thrashes that crashes.

> I am sure they will find ways
> to fuck anything up.

of course. But it should be hard to fuck up.

> The problem with Microsoft

Where did MS come into the picture?

> Compared with - say - the avionics industry there is zero quality
> control, in the ISO 9000 meaning of the word.

Ok, It thought DO178-B was that
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B>
Most military or avionics guys talks about that

>
> It's perfectly *possible* to write bug free programs in C.

Yes - but hard. Had you written it in Spark, your journey would have
been shorter - If you's be proficient in spark.

> As the help I
> got here with my daemons memory leak demonstrated.  Provided you test
> the code and analyse the problems that result.

>
> Writing in some 'foolproof' language  is no substitute for a proper
> testing and modification feedback loop to consistently test and improve
> the product, and the danger is that people will think that it is.
>

Of course. no-one said that these languages are a substitute for
testing. But testing WLL be shorter, because most bugs will be caught at
compile time.

And the 'many-eyes' mantra is no good either - as Heart Bleed
demonstrated. The faulty code was there for years without being detected.

--
/Björn

On 2023-12-29 18:15, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

>
> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.

And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.
Now, I wonder why people - 50 years after that - still want to use it.
It's like riding a bicycle on the back wheel only. Possible, but there
are simpler ways to ride a bike

--
/Björn

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I don't understand what this 'best' is all about.
> Are you fighting some sort of imaginary war?
>
> I think you need help.

obviously aliens visit this planet too :)

Björn Lundin <bnl@nowhere.com> writes:
> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>
>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>
> And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.

I’m not sure that’s born out by the history (e.g. [1]). In DMR’s account
the original goal was to be an implementation language for Unix. The
interest in portability is several years later and (in the same article)
the only reference to ‘portable assembler’ references C’s use as an
intermediate language in compilers for other languages, hardly a
recommendation for general-purpose use (the same description could be
applied to LLVM IR just as easily).

[1] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

I don’t think ‘portable assembler’ is a remotely good description of C
in any case. In assembler, almost every operation has a very
well-defined meaning, defined purely in terms of the bit patterns of the
operands to an instruction, and perhaps the CPU state etc, but with no
reference to value type or provenance. In contrast in C the rules are
much more complicated, and getting it wrong leads to programs behaving
in rather strange and unpredictable ways.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On 2023-12-30 21:19, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Björn Lundin <bnl@nowhere.com> writes:
>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>>
>> And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.
>
> I’m not sure that’s born out by the history (e.g. [1]).

Hmm, me surprised and some googling later, I see that.
I've heard a lot of times about c was created because
they (K&R) wanted to write a portable OS to one of
the early PDPs, instead of rewriting it in assembler for that particular
CPU. But it seems to be an urban legend.
I stand corrected

--
/Björn

On 30/12/2023 21:02, Björn Lundin wrote:
> On 2023-12-30 21:19, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> Björn Lundin <bnl@nowhere.com> writes:
>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> To people like me who migrated from assembler to C, it was heaven.
>>>
>>> And the intention of the language. To be portable assembler.
>>
>> I’m not sure that’s born out by the history (e.g. [1]).
>
> Hmm, me surprised and some googling later, I see that.
> I've heard a lot of times about c was created because
> they (K&R) wanted to write a portable OS to one of
> the early PDPs, instead of rewriting it in assembler for that particular
> CPU. But it seems to be an urban legend.
> I stand corrected
>
>
IIRC they needed a language that was better than assembler to write
their new OS in.
So being primarily an engineer and a comp sci, they threw it together
based on previous languages like ALGOL, B, and BCPL.

And you should remember the distinction between C as syntax, and the
standard libraries it had.

Malloc() and free[() are arguably NOT part of the C language, but its
standard implementation.

Certainly in my case programming 8 and 16 bit micros, they didn't come
with the compilers! Nor did any file I/O.

I think stdlib was all we got. String handling mainly. And possibly
floating point but on a 6809? Seriously?

On those platforms it WAS simply a fast way to write assembler. They
didn't have a whole lot of registers, and if I/O was memory mapped. I/O
calls were simple pointer dereferences.

At that level as far as I was concerned I could wrote e.g. bios code
about 4-10 times faster than assembler in a far more readable fashion
with almost no performance overheads.

If (weather==wet) take(umbrella);

is, in the assembler of then, a huge series of memory accesses and
compare and jump instructions which don't make the idea of what the
program is trying to do, any clearer at all.

In fact in general I would write two lines of comments for every line of
assembler.

They only time you needed assembler was in handling Intel style I/O and
probably some interrupt service routines, or writing things like context
switchers where you had to mess around with the stack pointers

Now at that level, we didn't need to be reminded of the fact that we
were dealing with hardware, not some compscis wet dream of a Turing
machine abstraction. Stomp on some other routines memory and it will
bite you in the bum. Stomp on the stack and all bets are off.

So we took extreme care not to.

The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
worked...to write them.

--
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.

Adolf Hitler

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
> I think stdlib was all we got. String handling mainly. And possibly
> floating point but on a 6809? Seriously?

Sure, why not, it was routine on 8-bit micros. The Dragon 32 is an
example that used the 6809 specifically.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
> worked...to write them.

There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for CP/M.
There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available. Also
almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>> worked...to write them.
>
> There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for CP/M.
> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available. Also
> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>

I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred more
academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, Lisp.

The benefit of C was that it was closer to assembler and suited the low
power CPUs of the time, when programmers needed to think close to the
metal in order to achieve acceptable performance.

On the job, C was easy to learn and the 'C Programming Language' was a
very good manual.

I was taught both OO and functional programming before I ever met C at
work, which may be why I was positive about OO-Design, C++ when it came
along.

To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.

On 31 Dec 2023 at 11:35:35 GMT, "Pancho" <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:

> On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>>> worked...to write them.
>>
>> There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
>> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for CP/M.
>> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available. Also
>> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
>> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
>> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>>
>
> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred more
> academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, Lisp.

My postgrad CS course was 1967/68 and we had a small (but ample) exposure to
Lisp, and also some flavour of Algol on the department's IBM 7094. There was
some clumsiness about using the Algol implementation that is now lost in the
mists of time - a character set limitation, perhaps.

> I was taught both OO and functional programming before I ever met C at
> work, which may be why I was positive about OO-Design, C++ when it came
> along.
>
> To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
> rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.

Whitesmith's for me.

--
Tim

On 31/12/2023 09:24, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>> I think stdlib was all we got. String handling mainly. And possibly
>> floating point but on a 6809? Seriously?
>
> Sure, why not, it was routine on 8-bit micros. The Dragon 32 is an
> example that used the 6809 specifically.
>
This was later than that. we had 16 bit micros by then for that sort of
stuff. Actually in that job we had some sort of DSP chip to do floating
point on. You shoved the command in one memory location and the numbers
in two others, and eventually it spat out the answers.

--
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule.
– H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956

On 31/12/2023 11:35, Pancho wrote:
> On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>>> worked...to write them.
>>
>>     There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
>> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for
>> CP/M.
>> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available. Also
>> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
>> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
>> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>>
>
> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred more
> academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, Lisp.
>
Compscis had their head in the clouds and their noses stuck up their
arses. We learnt how to code without any 'courses'

> The benefit of C was that it was closer to assembler and suited the low
> power CPUs of the time, when programmers needed to think close to the
> metal in order to achieve acceptable performance.
>
> On the job, C was easy to learn and the 'C Programming Language' was a
> very good manual.
>
all that

> I was taught both OO and functional programming before I ever met C at
> work, which may be why I was positive about OO-Design, C++ when it came
> along.
>
> To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
> rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.

I think I do too.

Did pascal have curlies?

I had a friend with an Apple II and he said he couldnt code in C because
it had no curlies...on the kee bored

--
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule.
– H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956

On 31/12/2023 12:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 31/12/2023 11:35, Pancho wrote:
>> On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
>>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>>>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>>>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>>>> worked...to write them.
>>>
>>>     There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
>>> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for
>>> CP/M.
>>> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available.
>>> Also
>>> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
>>> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
>>> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>>>
>>
>> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred
>> more academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML,
>> Lisp.
>>
> Compscis had their head in the clouds and their noses stuck up their
> arses. We learnt how to code without any 'courses'
>
>> The benefit of C was that it was closer to assembler and suited the
>> low power CPUs of the time, when programmers needed to think close to
>> the metal in order to achieve acceptable performance.
>>
>> On the job, C was easy to learn and the 'C Programming Language' was a
>> very good manual.
>>
> all that
>
>> I was taught both OO and functional programming before I ever met C at
>> work, which may be why I was positive about OO-Design, C++ when it
>> came along.
>>
>> To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
>> rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.
>
> I think I do too.
>
> Did pascal have curlies?
>

TimS used the indentation style name, "Whitesmith", which I'd never
heard before, so I looked it up. When I look back to then, compared to
now, the biggest difference for me is that I can just look stuff up. I
had no idea what Whitesmith meant, but a minute later I know. Back then,
I would have to spend ages trying to find out, scour multiple books, or
live in ignorance.

Apparently, my “Pascal Style” is called Allman.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Allman_style>

Pascal didn't have curlies, they had begin/end, but when I started
programming C I indented my curlies the same as begin/end in Pascal

> I had a friend with an Apple II and he said he couldnt code in C because
> it had no curlies...on the kee bored
>

Apple is Apple, I've never used any of their stuff.

On 31/12/2023 12:24, Pancho wrote:
> On 31/12/2023 12:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 31/12/2023 11:35, Pancho wrote:
>>> On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
>>>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>>>>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>>>>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>>>>> worked...to write them.
>>>>
>>>>     There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
>>>> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for
>>>> CP/M.
>>>> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available.
>>>> Also
>>>> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
>>>> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
>>>> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred
>>> more academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML,
>>> Lisp.
>>>
>> Compscis had their head in the clouds and their noses stuck up their
>> arses. We learnt how to code without any 'courses'
>>
>>> The benefit of C was that it was closer to assembler and suited the
>>> low power CPUs of the time, when programmers needed to think close to
>>> the metal in order to achieve acceptable performance.
>>>
>>> On the job, C was easy to learn and the 'C Programming Language' was
>>> a very good manual.
>>>
>> all that
>>
>>> I was taught both OO and functional programming before I ever met C
>>> at work, which may be why I was positive about OO-Design, C++ when it
>>> came along.
>>>
>>> To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
>>> rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.
>>
>> I think I do too.
>>
>> Did pascal have curlies?
>>
>
> TimS used the indentation style name, "Whitesmith", which I'd never
> heard before, so I looked it up. When I look back to then, compared to
> now, the biggest difference for me is that I can just look stuff up. I
> had no idea what Whitesmith meant, but a minute later I know. Back then,
> I would have to spend ages trying to find out, scour multiple books, or
> live in ignorance.
>
Ditto. I discovered I use Whitesmith style too.
To me it makes a block look like a block.

> Apparently, my “Pascal Style” is called Allman.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Allman_style>
>
> Pascal didn't have curlies, they had begin/end, but when I started
> programming C I indented my curlies the same as begin/end in Pascal
>
>> I had a friend with an Apple II and he said he couldnt code in C
>> because it had no curlies...on the kee bored
>>
>
> Apple is Apple, I've never used any of their stuff.
>
I did for a while.
Worst support community ever 'why not just reinstall' was the usual
response to everything.

>

--
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale
returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

>>
>> To this day I still prefer my brackets (C, C++, C#) in Pascal style
>> rather than K&R, which I begrudgingly use with Java.
>
> Whitesmith's for me.
>

You're a sick man and you need therapy.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I discovered I use Whitesmith style too.
> To me it makes a block look like a block.

Absolutely.

On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 11:35:35 +0000, Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
> On 31/12/2023 09:59, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:28:28 +0000
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> The problem was really that C was *so* good, that people did start to
>>> write hugely complex stuff in it, and using people who wouldn't know a
>>> register or a stack pointer if it poked them in the eye or how DMA
>>> worked...to write them.
>>
>> There were two other factors in the rise of C. You could get a C
>> compiler for just about anything, importantly there were several for CP/M.
>> There weren't many decent languages that were that widely available. Also
>> almost every university CS course used it from very early on (Cambridge
>> being the notable exception because Martin Richards was there) so from
>> around 1980 there were a *lot* of people trained in C.
>>
>
> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred more
> academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, Lisp.

My course in the mid 80s had Modula 2 and ML (it wasn't SML at the time)
as the main high level languages taught.

A bigger influence was that the main machines we used ran 4.2BSD (and
later Ultrix). So those of us who were keen, used C (and the odd
shell script) to write useful programs.

--
Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
- Douglas Adams

On 31/12/2023 12:24, Pancho wrote:
> TimS used the indentation style name, "Whitesmith", which I'd never
> heard before, so I looked it up. When I look back to then, compared to
> now, the biggest difference for me is that I can just look stuff up. I
> had no idea what Whitesmith meant, but a minute later I know. Back then,
> I would have to spend ages trying to find out, scour multiple books, or
> live in ignorance.
>
> Apparently, my “Pascal Style” is called Allman.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Allman_style>
Simply the best.
---druck

On 2023-12-31, TimS <tim@streater.me.uk> wrote:

> On 31 Dec 2023 at 11:35:35 GMT, "Pancho" <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> wrote:
>
>> I thought university CS courses of the era avoided C and preferred more
>> academic, pedagogical languages: Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, ML, Lisp.

During my abortive university CS period (1968-1971) there was a course
whose purpose was to expose you to as many programming languages as
possible, hitting you with a new one every two weeks. Algol 60,
Algol 68, Algol W, LISP, UMIST, SNOBOL4... Fortunately I dropped
out before having to take that one.

> My postgrad CS course was 1967/68 and we had a small (but ample) exposure to
> Lisp, and also some flavour of Algol on the department's IBM 7094. There was
> some clumsiness about using the Algol implementation that is now lost in the
> mists of time - a character set limitation, perhaps.

I remember that. It had something to do with enclosing all keywords
in apostrophes in place of the bold-faced type in the reference books.
It was nasty both in appearance and typing.

We started off with FORTRAN and moved to IBM 360 assembly language,
then on to other languages like PL/I. I decided I liked assembly
language because there was no snooty compiler slapping my wrist and
telling me I couldn't do something.

In one term project we were divided into three-person groups. The
other two wanted to use PL/I while I insisted on assembly language;
we compromised by having them do the theoretical processing in PL/I
while I wrote the I/O processor in assembly language. Interfacing
the two was a bear.

In another term project where we worked individually, I wrote my program
in assembly language. During the review my prof (also the CS department
head and one of the creators of Algol 68) would repeatedly look at me with
a pained expression and ask, "Why did you do it in assembly language?"

However, all ended well. I left the CS types in their ivory tower and
found a job in the Real World [tm], writing code in assembly language
and RPG. (The machines I worked on were too small to handle COBOL.)

Then along came C - it was a godsend, and I use it to this day.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 31 Dec 2023 at 21:36:25 GMT, "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>
wrote:

>> My postgrad CS course was 1967/68 and we had a small (but ample) exposure to
>> Lisp, and also some flavour of Algol on the department's IBM 7094. There was
>> some clumsiness about using the Algol implementation that is now lost in the
>> mists of time - a character set limitation, perhaps.
>
> I remember that. It had something to do with enclosing all keywords
> in apostrophes in place of the bold-faced type in the reference books.
> It was nasty both in appearance and typing.

Yes, yes !! That was it. Quite why we had to do that was a mystery.

--
Tim

On 31 Dec 2023 22:50:01 GMT
TimS <tim@streater.me.uk> wrote:

> On 31 Dec 2023 at 21:36:25 GMT, "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>
> wrote:
>
> > I remember that. It had something to do with enclosing all keywords
> > in apostrophes in place of the bold-faced type in the reference books.
> > It was nasty both in appearance and typing.
>
> Yes, yes !! That was it. Quite why we had to do that was a mystery.

It was so that the set of keywords in the language could be
extended without any risk of them ever being mistaken for variables. The
idea was that keywords were picked out by "stropping" them either by CASE
or with 'quotes' or by typeface (bold usually) instead of there being a set
of keywords that could not be used as variable names.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency