18 Feb
2015
18 Feb
'15
11:21 p.m.
On 02/18/2015 07:56 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
I would not call the CHM 1401 a production machine.
There might be a System/3 still in real service (at least there was
about four or five years ago).
The point is that COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol, etc. get a bad rap. Look what
they had to run on--you can't do that with C or several other more
contemporary languages.
Which brings up the question "Do you design a machine to run a language
or design a language to run on a machine?" That appears to have changed
over the last 30-40 years. Are we poorer for that?
The financial world didn't seem to mind decimal machines. Are we going
to make a dollar (or Euro) equal to 128 cents to accommodate radix-2
machines?
--Chuck