6 Nov
2006
6 Nov
'06
3:02 p.m.
On 6 Nov 2006 at 12:29, Fred Cisin wrote:
MOST of the Lisa software seems to have been written
in Pascal.
Part of Job's "we want the next (sic) generation, NOT a repeat of what we
already have!" philosophy that caused him to hire some CS graduates with
NO experience in order to get a fresh approach. Some of them didn't even
know that current Pascal compilers were designed for TEACHING programming,
and did not produce output suitable for real world.
At CDC back in the early 70's, a bunch of the systems software folks
jumped on the Pascal bandwagon and deployed their own version called
SYMPL. Up until that time, the entire OS was assembly and many of
the utilities and compilers were assembly and FORTRAN.
I don't think adoption of SYMPL did much for performance--or
maintainability, particularly in the first applications that were
ported from assembly to it.
Cheers,
Chuck