Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Russ Bartlett <arcbe2001 at yahoo.com> wrote: As has already been mentioned, I was referring to a generation or two _before_ you. *They* would have complained of your use of compilers and assembers. By your era, that argument was long stale. 11 years ago, I pointed this very fact out to "journalists" who were convinced that Y2K was all a scam to pad IT budgets because "nobody would have gone to that much trouble to save 4 bits (00-99 fits in 7 bits, 2000 fits in 11 bits) even in the 1950s. I pointed out that a) it was two characters, not 4 bits (BCD or EBCDIC or later ASCII), and b) a metropolitan utility company that just kept *only* two dates per customer would have millions of extra copies of "19" to keep track of, load, process, store, print, save, etc., and c) that one of the most easily exhausted resources was 80 columns on a punch card. If you encode the due-date of a utility bill onto the card for later processing, that's two columns less you have for account number or other pertinent information (I don't recall what punch-card bills specifically had on them - I only saw my parents pay them). Even the extra reels of tape from millions of copies of "19" will add up after a while. That's certainly true enough - who would have forecast that so much code was still running in one form or another after so many decades? It seems to me that any code written after 1980 _should_ have been written with 4-digit dates, but not enough of it was. We Americans were all too much in the habit of writing our dates as MM/DD/YY to get "far off" things to change. I personally made the switch in my own writing by the late 1980s, but I blame VMS and traveling in Europe for that (when is 01/02/03, as if 02/04/88 isn't bad enough? It all depends on where you are and where your audience is from.) -ethan