[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3

On 5/9/24 16:30, Michael Thompson wrote: Broadly speaking, there were only three major CDC versions; the 1972 original, the 1975 rewrite, and the (I think) 1980s version. There were intermediate versions, of course. I think that the 1975 version was widely used as a reference for many other implementations. But now comes the question, "Does one design a machine to a language or a language to a machine?" If you take the former course, you have the problem of not being able to implement features that the language designers didn't imagine. In the latter case, you wind up with a language that isn't easily made portable. C, being a "use at your own peril, and by the way, we have inline assembly language features" represents the former, but with lots of latitude. And it requires a certain amount of skill to use effectively. But heck, at CDC, we were writing FORTRAN programs that used negative subscripts. Who remembers SYMPL or CYBIL? LLL had their own extended dialect of FORTRAN, (LRLTRAN) which didn't have a single dialect. Consider the following, which addresses the problem of a standard language not having the necessary hardware implementation. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/390015.808405 I was briefly immersed in this mess with F90 X3J3. IBM, DEC and other had their own idea of a vector language (e.g. VECTRAN) and didn't want to entertain the committee's proposals. Both threatened to pull out over this. How many programming languages are there (past and future)? The lists I can find are far from exhaustive. Note that the Pascal site I noted talks about CDC 6000 SCALLOP. Never heard of it--must have been a local ETH creation. --Chuck