On Jan 17, 2025, at 12:10 PM, ben via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2025-01-17 8:46 a.m., Paul Koning wrote:
As for ALGOL, I know that Burroughs ALGOL (which
is an extended ALGOL-60) has separate compilation, through a linker called
"Binder". There is even a Binder for PDP-11 ALGOL, though I haven't tried
it. PDP-11 ALGOL looks very much like a 16-bit derivative of Burroughs ALGOL.
Gadzooks, A PDP running something other than B ^H C. :)
Other than Unix, C wasn't a common PDP-11 language. Mine run BASIC-PLUS, Macro-11,
TECO, FORTH, and ALGOL.
paul
Did Burroughs ALGOL, make cleaner software for people that used it?
What about FORTRAN users? (I keep wanting to spell FORTAN)
Ben.
What do you mean by "cleaner software"?
ALGOL was the primary language on Burroughs mainframes, and the machine architecture was
specificaly optimized for ALGOL. I don't know about FORTRAN (or COBOL) on those
machines, I expect it existed but I never ran into it.
Burroughs used ALGOL variants for various specialized purposes on those systems. For the
terminal I/O machinery there was DCALGOL (data comm Algol) and for the kernel there was
ESPOL -- basically ALGOL with C-like extensions to allow playing with lower level machine
details. Apparently there was no assembler; a document I saw says that the only low level
code is in the startup of the kernel, written in machine language (straight hex), just
enough to set up the stack and a few other registers and transfer control to the ESPOL
code entry point.
Interestingly enough, the system security depended in large part on the fact that there
was no assembler and access to ESPOL was restricted by file system access rules. If you
could write ESPOL programs you could do things that break security, but the regular ALGOL
compiler would not generate such code. This explains why at the shop where I used that
machine (TU Eindhoven, B 6700 system) I got some very suspicious looks from the staff when
I asked about wanting to read an ESPOL manual.
paul
