18 May
2016
18 May
'16
12:17 p.m.
On May 18, 2016, at 2:44 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 May 2016, John Willis wrote:
What a bizarre statement, given that there was plenty of precedent for doing so very
successfully.
It might be a valid statement if made much more nuanced, say by talking about the slowness
of the processors, or the inefficiency of the particular compilers used. But clearly
there had been successful (large scale) operating systems written in high level languages
well before the Mac.
paul
Let's not forget that the bulk of the Apple
Lisa operating system and
at least large parts of the original Macintosh system software were also
implemented in Pascal (though IIRC hand-translated into 68k assembly
language), which was a pretty big mainstream success for proving
Pascal as suitable for developing systems software.
At the time, it was sometimes interpreted differently:
"Apple hired brilliant people for the project. BUT, they had so little real-world
experience that they didn't even realize what a mistake it would be to write an OS in
a high level language.