10 May
2024
10 May
'24
1:44 p.m.
On May 9, 2024, at 8:58 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 5/9/24 16:30, Michael Thompson wrote:
Or neither. "Machine to a language" can be seen in the Burroughs mainframes
(ALGOL-60), in the IBM 360 (Fortran and COBOL) and perhaps some others. But a lot of
machines are not built to a particular language, certainly that's the case for most if
not all modern machines. Some machines might have features to optimize certainly
languages while still being quite general; the "display" support in the
Electrologica X8 is an example, but it is just as happy running Fortran or LISP.
As for "language to the machine" that's pretty much unheard of. While there
certainly are languages that only were seen on one or a few machines or architectures --
SYMPL, CYBIL, BLISS, TUTOR -- it isn't because that was the intent of those languages.
I suppose you could pose ESPOL as an example of a language for a machine, though I
suspect it could have been generalized, as C was, if there had been a desire to do so.
paul
I have a source code tape for Pascal on a CDC
6600 from CDC in France.
I am not sure which version it is.
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.