6 Aug
2008
6 Aug
'08
9:19 a.m.
On 6 Aug 2008 at 10:08, Paul Koning wrote:
Are you sure that COBOL ran on a PPU? I can't
imagine a reason for
doing that, other than as a "watch this" stunt. On the other hand,
Cobol on a 6000 CPU would be sensible and useful.
Dead sure--that's what makes it so interesting. The guy and a cohort
did it as a "stunt" project for a CDC VP (of which there were many).
He was not a CDC employee, but an outside consultant under contract.
He went back pretty far with COBOL--he was part of the original IBM
COMTRAN group. A very colorful character.
Was that before Forth came out? That's the
classic example of a
p-code language with multitasking.
About the same time. I seem to remember someone passing me an 8"
floppy with STOIC on it. My point was that p-code really has nothing
to do with Pascal itself--that the p-code technique was known long
before Pascal came out.
I think some companies, such as Ryan-McFarland exploited this
extensively early on by essentially taking the same language
implementation and retargeting it to different platforms by simply
changing the p-code interpreter implementation.
Cheers,
Chuck