7 Aug
2015
7 Aug
'15
12:22 p.m.
On Aug 7, 2015, at 3:08 PM, Eric Christopherson
<echristopherson at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:16 PM, Rich Alderson
<RichA at livingcomputermuseum.org> wrote:
Those are still fairly mainstream; my sister makes her living programming in those
languages.
From: Eric Christopherson
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2015 9:18 AM
I think maybe the scope of this question probably depends a lot on the
scope of the person asking it. I've only worked with microcomputers,
so things like COBOL and RPG (while I'm sure they are available on
micros in some form) are completely out of my ken. Is there a subset of this group for people who
like to program in
languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer
in common mainstream use? Or other groups for such a thing?
... ...
I don't like Forth as much as PS (doesn't seem as elegant), but it
does have its charms, and slowly I'm digesting it and learning its
conventions. It's nice that it's easily implemented on a small system.
Yes, which is why it is used in some boot ROMs to this day. A basic implementation is
only a few hundred lines of assembly language, plus however much Forth code you want for
the not-so-primitive operations.
PostScript is a Forth derivative with different name binding rules. It doesn?t seem any
more elegant to me, but it does have a few more data types. It also requires vastly more
memory, which is quite ok given its intended purpose.
...I do a lot
of my daily programming in PDP-10 assemblers, usually Macro-20
but when working on WAITS it's FAIL and on ITS it's MIDAS. In addition,
I occasionally program in MIT TECO, to keep my hand in as the maintainer
of the original EMACS (RMS said so).
Ah... text editors are another big interest of mine. That's very cool.
I should check TECO out some day.