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

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.

--
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

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:27:31 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> 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.

> 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.

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:40:31 +0000, John Levine wrote:

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

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

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

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:03:49 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:

> 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.

On 9/25/24 3:11 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> 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_."

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.

> 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.

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'.

On 9/25/24 16:03, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> writes:
>> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>>
>>> On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:03:13 +0800, Woozy Song wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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.

On 9/25/24 18:31, Lynn Wheeler wrote:

> . 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.

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:17:39 -1000
Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> wrote:

> 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
>
I recall Jeff Gribbin, very keen on CP67.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:42:32 +0100, Pancho wrote:

> ... 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.

On 9/26/24 11:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:42:32 +0100, Pancho wrote:
>
>> ... 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.

On 26 Sep 2024 01:32:26 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

> 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...

On 2024-09-26, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

> 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.

> 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.)

--
/~\ 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

Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
> 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

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

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:49:37 +0100, Pancho wrote:

> On 9/26/24 11:10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 08:42:32 +0100, Pancho wrote:
>>
>>> ... 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.

All these things were standardized in the VAX/VMS ABI, right from the
beginning.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:49:14 -1000, Lynn Wheeler wrote:

> ... 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.

That happens to every company: a small, hungry, quick-moving, risk-taking
startup grows large and successful, and becomes conservative, slow-moving
and risk-averse.

Microsoft is an interesting example: Bill Gates had read all the books on
the above, and during the 1990s he was able to negotiate a balance in
which Microsoft stayed hungry and kept the startup mindset even as it
became large and successful. After he stood aside, the predictable pattern
followed.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:18:01 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> 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.

Use a high-level language which has all this and more:

for item in "the,quick,brown,fox".split(",") :
print(item)
#end for

Output:

the
quick
brown
fox

In Python, strings are objects, and that applies to string expressions
(including string literals) as well.

On 26 Sep 2024 01:32:26 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> I bought the CP/M version of Turbo Pascal mostly on a whim. "50 bucks --
> this I gotta see."

There was actually a product called “JRT Pascal” before that, which was
even cheaper. But not as successful.

> iirc it had enough non-standard extensions to be useful ...

Basically it was a member of the UCSD Pascal family.

On 26/09/2024 04:16, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

>   Oh, one lang I can't stomach - ADA.

So much the worse for you.

--
Bill F.

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:48:02 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:49:14 -1000, Lynn Wheeler wrote:
>
>> ... 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.
>
> That happens to every company: a small, hungry, quick-moving,
> risk-taking startup grows large and successful, and becomes
> conservative, slow-moving and risk-averse.
>
> Microsoft is an interesting example: Bill Gates had read all the books
> on the above, and during the 1990s he was able to negotiate a balance in
> which Microsoft stayed hungry and kept the startup mindset even as it
> became large and successful. After he stood aside, the predictable
> pattern followed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence

That was required reading in the '80s and the company I worked for even
had a mandatory presentation by 'experts'. The authors used exemplars of
successful businesses and their culture -- many of which were soon to
fail.

In the '70s it was 'matrix management' with DEC and TI pointed to as the
way to go. At least TI survived.

On 26 Sep 2024 22:36:05 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence
>
> That was required reading in the '80s and the company I worked for even
> had a mandatory presentation by 'experts'. The authors used exemplars
> of successful businesses and their culture -- many of which were soon
> to fail.

Not surprising. To keep succeeding, you have to keep taking risks. Which
means you could fail at any time.

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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.
>

Supposed to be NPL (New Programming Language) but some wonky organization
in the UK was already using that,

--
Pete

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

That was one of the things holding up adoption. They fixed it with the
“Optimizing Compiler”, but it was a bit late by then. PL/I(F) was all
overlays. It kept the working text of the program in memory and made
I-don’t-know how many passes thru it. Trying to make it fit in a 64K
partition was a major problem.

>
> 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
>

--
Pete

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On 25 Sep 2024 04:38:54 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>
>> 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.
>

Operating Systems written in FPC

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Operating_Systems_written_in_FPC

I don’t know how much has been added to FPC above the base language.

--
Pete

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
> On 9/24/24 8:26 AM, Lars Poulsen 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/.
>
>
> 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.
>

For a long time, FORTRAN was the only remotely portable language, so lots
of programs were written in it.

--
Pete

Bob Eager <news0009@eager.cx> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:06:36 +0000, rbowman wrote:
>
>> On 25 Sep 2024 06:52:08 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> 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, ...
>

PL.8

--
Pete