rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:
>On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
>
>> 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.

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>On 2024-09-24, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>>
>>> 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.

On 24/09/2024 20:11, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:
>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
>>
>>> 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!

--
Renewable energy: Expensive solutions that don't work to a problem that
doesn't exist instituted by self legalising protection rackets that
don't protect, masquerading as public servants who don't serve the public.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:

> 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.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> 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”.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 17:12:30 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <llfsmdFmmqaU8@mid.individual.net>,
> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
>>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.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:

> Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>
>> On 23/09/2024 23:45, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>> > 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/.
>>
>>
> 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.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:
> On 23/09/2024 23:45, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>   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/.
>
>

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.

--
Pete

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.

> 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.

--
Pete

R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
> rbowman wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
>>
>>> 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.

--
Pete

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:
> On 2024-09-24, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>>
>>> 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...
>
>> 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.

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

--
Pete

Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>> On 2024-09-24, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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?

--
Pete

Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
>
>> Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 23/09/2024 23:45, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>> 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/.
>>>
>>>
>> 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.

--
Pete

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:05 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> Once I got network programming figured out, I wrote my own library of
> functions that set everything up the way I want it (including SSH and
> TLS). Sure, you have to watch your step sometimes, but it's not quite
> as bad as people make it out to be.

I saw no reason to reinvent the OpenSSL wheel particularly if you need
FIPS compliance.

On 2024-09-24, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:05 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> Once I got network programming figured out, I wrote my own library of
>> functions that set everything up the way I want it (including SSH and
>> TLS). Sure, you have to watch your step sometimes, but it's not quite
>> as bad as people make it out to be.
>
> I saw no reason to reinvent the OpenSSL wheel particularly if you need
> FIPS compliance.

My libraries call OpenSSL, but let me establish a connection
(with or without TLS) with a single call.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
>Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:
>> Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
>>> On 2024-09-24, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> 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.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 20:01:31 +0200, R Daneel Olivaw wrote:

> 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.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> 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.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 21:14:04 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> 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.

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 21:09:47 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> 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...

On 2024-09-24, Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> wrote:

> R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>
>> 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...

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On 2024-09-24, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> 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

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> 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

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 16:05:25 -1000, Lynn Wheeler wrote:

> ... 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?)

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.