On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:03 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> Bob Eager wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>
>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:45:51 +0000, rbowman wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> 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.

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

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

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 13:01:16 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <llgrccFmmqaU9@mid.individual.net>,
> Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
>>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.
>
> Huh; curious. I wonder who did it, then.

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

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

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

On 25 Sep 2024 04:38:54 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
> 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.

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
>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!

On 25 Sep 2024 15:48:01 GMT
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:

> 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.

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

[]
> 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).

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

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

> 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...
>
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

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

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

[]
> >
>

[Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
Bottle" from 1977?]
> Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.

Call the police.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

On 2024-09-25, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 01:44:52 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 9/24/24 3:17 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 02:45:16 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> Still have my K&R 'C' book ...
>>>
>>> Would hope you have caught up with C99, at least.
>>
>> Ummm ... STILL mostly stick to the Original Product.
>> Can't go wrong.
>
> Hopefully you've moved past K&R style function definitions. afak they will
> still compile though.

#ifdef PROTOTYPE
int foo(char *bar, BOOL baz)
#else
int foo(bar,baz) char *bar; BOOL baz;
#endif

There. Best of both worlds. I don't know how long it's been since
I used a compiler that doesn't support prototypes, but I'm ready...

--
/~\ 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

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
> 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

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

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:
> 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

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

According to Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>:
>> 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.

>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.

>> 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.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
> 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.

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

On 2024-09-25, Kerr-Mudd, John <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:

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

--
/~\ 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 2024-09-25, Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:

> 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

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_)

--
/~\ 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 2024-09-25, Kerr-Mudd, John <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:45 +0200
> R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>
> []
>> >
>>
>
> [Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
> Bottle" from 1977?]
>> Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.
>
> Call the police.

<snicker>

--
/~\ 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 2024-09-25, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

> 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.

--
/~\ 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

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

> John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:
>> 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.

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:01:45 +0200
> R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>
> []
>>>
>>
>
> [Unquoted sig not present, but a quote from a song "Message in a
> Bottle" from 1977?]
>> Hmm, your .sig is all about pollution of the seas.
>
> Call the police.
>

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

> 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.

> 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

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:22:54 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

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

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

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:36:58 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> 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.

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:34:51 -0700, John Ames wrote:

> 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?

On 25 Sep 2024 15:48:01 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

> 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.

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:07:29 -0700, John Ames wrote:

> ... 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.