11 Aug
2015
11 Aug
'15
3:24 p.m.
On 08/11/2015 07:52 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
Yes, that was a pretty nice system. Certainly not the
first ALGOL
system, but a decent one even though they did put a bunch of
Fortran-like ugliness into the I/O.
As I recall, the I/O in the Algol-60 report was not particularly
well-defined. Pascal followed this pattern also.
So Burroughs could hardly be blamed.
PDP11 DECUS ALGOL was clearly inspired by that, it?s a
subset of
Burroughs ALGOL and the generated code looks like a 16-bit variant of
B5500 machine code.
I hadn't realized that descriptors had been implemented on the PDP-11.
Note though that some of the discussion was about
Algol 68, which is
a rather different language. I don?t know that Burroughs ever did
anything with it, but some other companies did (CDC for one).
I don't know where Algol 68 in the CDC world came from; I am aware of no
one in CPD Sunnyvale who worked on it. Was it a VIM contribution?
?native? in what sense? There are plenty of machines,
from many
companies, that support block structured languages well. The PDP11
and VAX are among those, as are the Burroughs mainframes, the
Electrologica EL-X8, and many others. If so, they will do well at
Algol, Pascal, C, Modula, Ada, and so on.
Well, CDC 6600 routinely beat out IBM's iron on COBOL, even without
character addressability or the capability for decimal arithmetic.
If you mean ?native? in the sense of an instruction
set tailored for
running Algol programs, no ? in that sense, Burroughs was rather
unusual, though you might point at the Electrologica EL-X8 as another
example.
That's exactly what I mean.
--Chuck