On 11/8/06, Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> wrote: Funny you should mention that environment - the example I had in mind was on an 11/73 under TSX... I can entirely agree with that. The specific situation I had in mind, to answer Marvin, was working on an ultrasonic component inspection system written by someone else in Pascal. My task was to go in and permit single or double resolution scans compared to the original arrangement. The system worked as designed, including a display task under TSX to read scan data. The sticking point was not double-density data collection; that was easy. It was the display task. Fundamentally, it came down to architecture limitations crossed with language limitations. The original task opened a file of 768 nybbles per record (one scan line). The new task needed to open *either* a file of 768 nybbles or 1536 nybbles per line. Because I/O on Pascal is a) built-in and b) record oriented, the compiler tried to allocate a record buffer for each type of file. If I'd been writing in C or assembler, I could have allocated one 1536 nybble buffer and either used half of it or all of it. There was no way to tell Pascal that I knew I'd never open both types of files at once and to only worry about buffering I/O for one type of file or the other. If I'd been able to throw out Pascal's I/O and roll my own in assembler, I would have. I was trapped. (the solution, if you are curious, was to create two display tasks, one single-density only, the other double-density. The dispatch task chose which one to send a message to depending on the request from the user and the contents of the scan file). I, on the other hand, _would_ elevate C much higher than Pascal, if only because you can, among other things, adapt or even entirely replace the standard library (unlike Pascal which has reserved keywords for way too many things). C has been called a "glorified PDP-11 assember" - given that I learned assembler on the PDP-11 (and the 6502 and 1802 and the Z-80...) before I tried C, it all made sense very rapidly. I don't see that slam as a limitation. -ethan

Actually, if you use gcc instead, it has something very much like lambda-expressions in many of their common uses. You don't get real data-as-code lambda expressions, but you get functions with no real name which appear textually at the point of use. For example, qsort(vec, n, sizeof(FOO), ({ int cmp(const void *a, const void *b) { return( ((FOO *)a)->sortkey - ((FOO *)b)->sortkey ); } &cmp; }) ); It's one of the four extensions to C I like and use; I find they greatly increase the utility of the language. (The others are nonlocal gotos as a throw mechanism, array sizes which are not compile-time constants, and labeled control structure - the last not being present in stock gcc.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 11/9/06, Warren Wolfe <wizard at voyager.net> wrote: Oh, yeah... wierd is the best word for it. I was working at a small shop that did PCs and PDP-11s in 1988... we had a customer bring in a MicroPDP-11/53 for a disk upgrade. We were all ready for it until we turned it on and found out it was running MUMPS. We did eventually upgrade the disk for the customer, but it took a lot longer to puzzle out how to do it (I think my boss was expecting RT-11 or MicroRSX). I never programmed a MUMPS system, but my recollection of the disk upgrade was that it was all menu driven, and there was no (obvious) way to drop to a command line. -ethan

Hi, Brad Parker said: I've been playing with FIG-Forth on my 11/73. I've been able to resurrect some code which originally ran on my TRS-80 circa 1979. Good fun. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com The future was never like this!

On 9 Nov 2006 at 11:54, Dave McGuire wrote: ...and the same goes for other general-purpose languages after you've used a few special-purpose ones, such as Simscript, GPSS or Prolog. After getting your mind around the way these *don't* work, the standard languages look remarkably similar to one another. Cheers, Chuck