11 Aug
2015
11 Aug
'15
2:52 p.m.
On Aug 11, 2015, at 1:16 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at
sydex.com> wrote:
On 08/10/2015 07:07 PM, Mark Kahrs 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.
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.
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).
One could always implement a KDF9 emulator and
then port Randall and
Russell code (from the book).
And r.e. ALGOL68, Peter Hibbard had some sort of ALGOL68 system
working on the PDP11s at CMU I believe.
Why all this DEC stuff about Algol? Go to the source--the Burroughs B5500 (or if you
want, the B5000). A piece of engineering much advanced for its time.
Did DEC ever produce a machine that ate Algol as its native programming language?
?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.
Some other machines don?t make stack operations and recursive functions easy, and as such
could be called ?Fortran machines? ? CDC 6000 series, IBM 360, and PDP-8 are examples.
Still, with a bit of extra work those too can handle Algol and other block-structured
languages. After all, the first Pascal was implemented on the CDC 6600 (by ETH Z?rich).
And CDC shipped both Algol 60 and Algol 68 compilers. IBM had an Algol 60 for OS/360, as
I recall, though I?ve never used it.
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.
paul