Of course. As usually said, he's not between us, but his legacy will pervive forever. In this way, I couldn't avoid during last days, seeing with certain perspective the passing away of S.Jobs, DMR and now McCarthy, to think about what was the computing and what is, mostly as Science but as a Profession too. It's my profession (yet) but many times, as these days, I feel the passion for it flying away every year. Is the cause of this my belief in the end of an era ? SPc. 2011/10/25 Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>

Leaving aside LISP and its descendants, JMC would still be important in the history of computing for having first named and described the concept of "timesharing" in computers. (NB: Strachey's concept of "timesharing" is rather what we now call "multiprogramming" or "multiforking", as he himself said to McCarthy decades ago.) If not for timesharing, DEC would not have created the PDP-6 which begat the PDP-10 which hosted or inspired a large number of developments which led to the world of today. Rich (laptop, Germany, no .sig)

On 26/10/11 3:36 AM, SPC wrote: Hi Sergio Last night I came across (via Quora*) a piece by Paul Graham that tries to put McCarthy's early Lisp work into perspective. http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html (The article itself is linked here as a PostScript file.) I haven't read it all yet. --Toby * - http://www.quora.com/Ben-Newman/R-I-P-John-McCarthy

On 26 October 2011 13:40, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: Nice article - thanks for that! The more I read about Lisp, the more I want to understand... but I suspect I am too old & even in my youth I never got much past BASIC. The only Lisp I've been able to follow code in is Dylan, and Dylan seems to be rather moribund... :?( -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 27 October 2011 00:41, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I don't currently have the spare budget for buying books, but I do have a few PDFs: * Common Lisp - A gentle introduction to symbolic computation book * COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach ... and some elderly text. As I try to read them, I get this sinking feeling after half a dozen pages where what started off making sense quietly and subtly turns to word soup. Arithmetic tends to get replaced with gibberish that resembles English but isn't, along the lines of "ah, but if we use a quote, then the we don't get the name of the atom, we get the value." And it quickly starts feeling like /Alice through the Looking Glass:/ ? Alice was walking beside the White Knight in Looking Glass Land. "You are sad." the Knight said in an anxious tone: "let me sing you a song to comfort you." "Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. "It's long." said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it - either it brings tears to their eyes, or else -" "Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. "Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'" "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged, Aged Man.'" "Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself. "No you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only what it's called, you know!" "Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On a Gate': and the tune's my own invention." ? (from http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~nicholson/alice.html) So, now, see, this is a list, but it's also an expression, but if we call it as a function then the expression modifies the atoms in the lisp, but it's still an expression, because all lists are expressions but only some expressions are functions. Some lists are cons but cons can be a list of things, but be careful not to muddle up atoms and conss. You see? Perfectly simple! I find this tends to happen before the page count is in double digits. So tonight, I tried working through some of this with Stephane Tsacas on chat. I tried installing Steel Bank Common Lisp, but every other thing I type generates 10 lines of error messages and takes me into a debugger. Stephane has recommended Allegro Common Lisp, but it doesn't even seem to understand cursor up/cursor down. And don't talk to me about Emacs. I tried and failed to follow the tutorial in 1988 and I'm a lot grumpier and less flexible nowadays than I was then. We shall see. I shall have another try. If I bounce off again, a friend has offered me some Python tuition. Perhaps C21 languages might be less prone to making my aging brain do the 'splodey thing. ;?) -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Liam, A previous version of this text, which had a first part about AI (split into a separate book when this version came out), was the reason I didn't drop out of computer science during my first year at the university. I had been fascinated by computers since childhood and learned Basic and assembly language while in high school. At the university I met Fortran, Algol and learned Pascal on my own. These were all slight variations of the same thing - computers had become so boring that I considered moving on to electronic musical instruments. My father met an american who was visting Brazil and was reading Patrick's 1977 "Artificial Intelligence" (he wasn't even a computer guy, but had bought the book on a whim to have something to read on the plane). Since computer books were hard to find around here, my father offered to buy the book for twice what it cost so the guy could get another copy when he returned home. When he told me he had bought a book about "some programming language", I thought he had wasted his money because I saw no point in learning the details of yet another variation of Algol. The first part of the book (now http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-3rd-Winston/dp/0201533774) showed me a completely new side of computing (not boring!) and the second part (the book you have) showed how to implement the theory, and it didn't look anything like Algol. Once I saw that things could be different, I quickly learned APL, Forth, Smalltalk, Occam, FP, Prolog and so on. I am not sure that either part of the book by itself would have had the same impact on me, so I think it is a pity that it was split even if each half gained interesting new material. So thanks, Patrick Henry Winston, but most of all thanks John McCarthy! -- Jecel

[snip] The Little Lisper didn't make much sense to me until after I'd read some "real" books about Lisp (I really like the one DEC published). Just showing someone how to car, cdr and cons isn't all that helpful. :-) -- Ian

I don't really think that's fair. Scheme is a bit closer to the lambda calculus and many - most? - Lisps in some respects, perhaps, but identifying Lisp with the lambda calculus is ignoring the difference between theory and implementation. I consider Scheme one member of the Lisp family, but no more than that. It makes some interesting and unusual choices; like most cases where there are many different versions of something, Scheme is better at some things and worse at others (as compared to either any other particular member of the family or to a fictional generic "average" implementation).... That hardly means much. An introductory course, especially one which focuses on the theoretical aspects, or the common aspects, is likely to do exactly that without any implication that it's fair to identify the whole language family with any particular implementation. If I were to teach a course on C, for example, I might well mention that the compiler I'm using is whichever one it is, but then proceed to teach C, rather than any particular implementation of C. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

You can't teach "standard C" without picking a standard, too. There are at least three (K&R v1, ANSI C, and C99) and probably more that I'm not aware of or which don't come to mind immediately. "The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from!" /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

You can come pretty close. A whole lot of the syntax is the same (parentheses-surrounded prefix function calls, for example), and much of the rest is trivial details of the "CL spells this foo, Scheme spells it bar" sort. It's only when you dig a lot deeper than most novices will that you start seeing major differences. I dunno. I learnt Lisp long before I learnt anything about the lambda calculus. Just as we teach kids to add and multiply before we teach them the underlying theory (this is why the New math was such a disaster - indeed, many people never learn the underlying theory because they have no reason to care about it), I see nothing wrong with teaching Lisp without teaching the underlying theory. It's true that you can't be really good at Lisp without at least a little of the underlying theory, but you don't need it in the form of theory; what you need are the abstractions, without necessarily understanding their theoretical underpinnings. It's perhaps better if you do, but that's true of any field; just as I'm a better Lisper for knowing a little about the lambda calculus, I'm a better C programmer for knowing a little about complex analysis and Taylor series and error analysis and combinatorics and many other things. Indeed, I would argue that some familiarity with the lambda calculus will make you a better programmer even if you never touch Lisp. Much the same is true of combinatorics and all those other fields. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Sun, 30 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote: This must be a different meaning of standardized than I was previously familiar with. Or perhaps it meets with George Morrow's definition of standards, in that everyone can have a unique one of their own. K&R explicitly leaves many choices, such as number of bits in each variable type, up to the compiler author, and defends it as permitting creating whatever would be best for the hardware platform. "Standard Library", by the way, is NOT "standardized library". It is "standard" as opposed to "optional equipment". Just as each individual car model can have different "standard equipment", each compiler can have enormous latitude in "standard library". Although some functions such as printf() had better be included if the compiler author expects to survive, there are many functions whose definitions are subject to interpretation. For example, does puts() add a newline ('\n')? Many implementation choices, rather than be codified or standardized are left open, and are now often referred to as "undefined". Not "undefined" as in x/0 , but "undefined" as in what does n=2; A[n++] = n++; do? A "standard" is "a ten foot pole with a flag on top". -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 30 Oct 2011, at 2:18 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I gather you didn't have to suffer through using Ada much ;) -- Dr. Christian Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E

On 30 Oct 2011, at 3:03 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: You seriously didn't miss anything, since just about every program of any consequence on the planet applied for and was granted wavers from using it. I haven't seen any, although JOVIAL seems to still be alive and well at SEA -- who also seems to do website design (yes, it make my head hurt, too). -- Dr. Christian Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E

At 1:19 pm -0700 2011/10/30, Fred Cisin wrote: Likewise ANSI standard FORTRAN (or USASI standard FORTRAN, if you go back to '66), which nevertheless became the premier language for numeric processing. C89 and F90 both standardized means for programs to query and request certain properties of numeric types. It is for the past 22 years. Yes, and always has, since its appearance in V7 Unix; no room for interpretation there. -- Kevin Schoedel <schoedel at kw.igs.net> VA3TCS

On 26/10/11 7:59 PM, Liam Proven wrote: There is a certain amount of UN-learning required, if your mind has been entrained in the C-like ways. However, you quickly find that the core concepts make a good deal of sense and strip away unnecessary mucking about. (After a while, C's boilerplate for linked lists gets boring, tedious and error-prone compared to manipulating them functionally.) Learning Erlang (as I did a few years ago) softened up the mental pathways for Scheme - it uses the same list representation, and has similar primitives, and practically enforces looping via recursion. While that may sound odd to imperative programmers, people frequently say (of both Erlang and Scheme) that they put the fun back into programming. I would advise not to begin with Common Lisp. Start with Scheme, and those two texts I mentioned (one of which is online). I also had planned to dive right into Common Lisp, but on the advice of a wise friend (a CL programmer professionally and functional programming expert) I began with Scheme instead, and I think that was a better method. So, grab an introductory text, and _do the exercises_ :) --Toby

On Oct 26, 2011, at 7:59 PM, Liam Proven wrote: SBCL is high-performance, but it's a bit finicky. I've found GNU CLISP to be a pretty easy-to-start environment, at least. You may find a Scheme interpreter to be a bit easier, even; Scheme is basically a very terse dialect of Lisp (I know, I'm oversimplifying, but if you don't know either, it might as well be true). - Dave

On 26/10/11 8:03 PM, Glen Slick wrote: Doesn't get much more awesome than that :) I wish I'd learned Scheme first, then C. SICP is an important book - I am working my way through it myself - but I deliberately didn't recommend it to Liam, as it would perhaps not be very helpful to somebody who already feels intimidated by Lisp. --T

really must take the time to read it properly... -tony

On 28/10/11 10:15 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: It's available online http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html via his home page, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ For history buffs (not so much Lisp learners), there is also Lisp I Programmer's Manual (March 1, 1960) http://history.siam.org/sup/Fox_1960_LISP.pdf --Toby

On 29 October 2011 03:15, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote: I've done a little Googling and from the few scant mentions I can find, I can't, TBH, see much different myself, as an outsider looking in. I understand the namespace distinction (I think) but the syntax looks nigh-identical from the few snippets I found. Noted. Ta! Hmmm. Interesting. I wonder if I can remember enough BBC BASIC to implement a very crude Lisp in it. :?D Many thanks! Lots of food for further reading there. May I ask: what do folk think of the quote I've often seen cited: * Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio. * Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you." * Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 10/30/2011 01:17 PM, Toby Thain wrote: BBC BASIC has an inline assembler for 6502?? Wow, that's wild. What hardware would I need to cobble together to run that? -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Toby Thain wrote: Some thousands sold in the US (with modifications for NTSC and 60Hz, and changes to some spelling (COLOR for COLOUR, etc). I think it may have had a modified (for 110V) PSU, but I remember a story about that. I was working for an Acorn (who made the BBC Micro) distributor, and got a call from someone having trouble with a monitor. He was using his BBC Micro overseas -- ie not in the UK -- with a TV, but after buying a monitor instead couldn't get it to work. After a few questions, I realised he had been running the (unmodified) Beeb with a locally-purchased TV off 110V. The Beeb didn't mind, the TV was fine of course, but the monitor he'd bought on a previous trip back to the UK really did want 240V. Because the Beeb worked he'd never considered the voltage difference! Another way to get assembler in BBC BASIC, though with Z80 assembler rather than 6502, is R.T.Russell's BBC BASIC which runs under CP/M, and there are other implementations for other OSs (the Windows version has 80486 assembler). There's even one for UNIX, though I can't remember if that includes an assembler (I think not). http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/history.html -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Acorn made some nice machines. Does anybody know if the RISC OS version of BBC BASIC includes inline ARM assembly support? That would be fun. Mike

On 31 October 2011 13:13, Michael Kerpan <madcrow.maxwell at gmail.com> wrote: Yes, it does. There is now a free RISC PC emulator out there, too: RPCemu Spoon Edition. Due to a lot of recent work by the maintainer, who's a mate of mine, it now runs the small-f free Shared Source edition of RISC OS http://www.marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/ http://www.riscosopen.org/ So you can download a free emulator, a free set of ROMs containing the most current version of one fork of RISC OS, and play with BBC BASIC V for nothing. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

IIRC it uses the CUTS tones, genrated and decoded in hardware (a custom chip called the 'Serial ULA' linked to a 6850). It should be very easy to archive the tapes. And to answer another quesiton in the thread. the RISC OS versionm of BBC BASIC, as used on the Archimedes machines, etc, does have an ARM assembler built in. Or at least the versions I've used do. -tony

Pete Turnbull wrote: Hmm, yes I don't recall if the stock PSU was guaranteed to work on 110V automagically, and so the US models got exactly the same ones as the UK. IIRC the US models had a lot of extra shielding in the case - although I heard once that it wasn't strictly necessary to meet US regs, but just a precautionary measure. cheers Jules

I regard the BBC micro as one of the best designed 8-bit micros ever. My only wish is that they should have used a 6809 processor ;-) I have (and use) an Acorn Cambridge Workstation. That's a BBC B+ board (this has 64K RAM, it overlays the video memory giving more space for BASIC programs, etc) built inot a monitor-style case. The monitor is a Micorvitec colour unit, there's also a 5.25" 80 cylinder floppy drive, a 20MByute hard disk and a 32016-based second processor board with 4M RAM. And yes, it runs BBC BASIC. One of the 'computing' teachers at school tried to make it against the rules of have a Motorola 6854 [1] data sheet. Since I'd bought the complete data boo kfor my homebrewing projects, I was not going to abide my that. I refused to rip the pages out! [1] No I don't mean 6845, which is the CRT controlelr (and is used in the Beeb). The 6854 ias a synchronosu serial interface chip ans used used for the Econet. So do I.... -tony

Adrian Graham wrote: I wish I still had either of mine. Both were loaned or donated to dealers in the later stages of that product's life :-( There were more than 4 models in the ABC range, though, Witchy. I had a Z80 one briefly (ABC100, the one with twin floppies and CP/M), and there were two models of 32016-based ones (ABC200 with floppies and ABC210 with a hard drive), both of which I've seen. I don't remember ever seeing an ABC Personal Assistant (6502 copro) or an ABC Terminal in the flesh, though. I still have the product range brochure, a few other bits and pieces, and the software catalogue for the ABC100 and ABC110 range. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On Oct 30, 2011 10:16 PM, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: hardware would I need to cobble together to run that? The BBC Micro version does, yes. The CP/M, Z88 & Spectrum versions have Z80. The PC version does X86 & the Archimedes version has ARM assembler. It's a standard feature of the language. All version have it, AFAIK. BASIC is the only language I know well and am really comfortable in, so I picked the best BASIC there is. It's also the fastest interpreter there has ever been, as far as I know. Of you want to play with BBC BASIC, there's a FOSS interpreter called Brandy. It's reverse-engineered and not as fast, though. Richard T Russell owns the copyright now, I think, and does all the official ports. They are all closed, commercial software, though. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

From: Liam Proven Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 9:00 AM On 29 October 2011 03:15, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote: [snip] Since my first exposure to Pascal was via the 3-part Tiny Pascal article in BYTE, where a subset compiler was written in NorthStar BASIC, that would be very interesting. Writing a Pascal compiler for the DEC-20 in BASIC+2 was how I stopped doing my Ph. D. work in linguistics. Back when I saw first a version of this, Emacs Lisp wasn't on the radar, and H'sMC was not written, so perhaps I should be quiet. Back in the early days, when dinoLisps roamed the earth, there was a very successful variant called MACLISP. This ran on PDP-10s, under ITS and TOPS-20 and WAITS (the Tops-10 variant on SAIL), and on a GE-645 under Multics.[1] Now, there was a desire to have a version of the EMACS editor for the PDP-10 on Multics, because it had built into it an awareness of LISP syntax, even though it was written in a far more arcane language called TECO.[2] A bright fellow, Bernie Greenberg, thought to himself that with just a few tweaks, MACLISP could be used to create a version of EMACS on Multics, and proceeded to do so. At the same time, over at the MIT AI Lab, people were experimenting with new progamming languages all the time, and the best language for implementing new programming languages was LISP, and the best LISP was MACLISP. These folks were looking into problem-solving systems, and the first successful language of this type was PLANNER. This was followed by CONNIVER. Then, like a little mammaLisp among the dinoLisps, there arose SCHEME. This was written, like the others in MACLISP, and showed its dinoLisp DNA in places. SCHEME fell into the hands of the smaller-is-better enthusiasts, and had more and more of its origins trimmed away with each new revision. It is nearly perfect. This makes it hard to use, hard even to grasp, except by those who spend all of their time concentrating only on Scheme.[3] MACLISP continued along in its imperfections, influencing the development of Lisp machines, such as Symbolics, LMI and the TI Explorer, and of new variants of Lisp on strange architectures like the VAX (for example, NIL under VMS and Franz Lisp under Unix). So many variants of MACLISP arose that some felt a need to reduce the clutter. But these were people of vision, so they invited not only those who worked in the MACLISP variants, but the Standard Lisp/Portable Standard Lisp folks what the common denominator of all these variants of Lisp might be. And so was born Common Lisp, which rather than being the refined intersection of all which was the ultimate fate of Scheme, became the enhanced union of all. In the mean time, those Lisp machines used editors which grew out of the Multics (!) version of EMACS written in MACLISP. The maintainer of the software for one manufacturer, LMI, who was the original author of EMACS in TECO, saw that this was good, and bethought himself that making this also available on Unix workstations (the wet dream of the day) would be a good idea, along the way to overthrowing the source-hoarding Unix hegemony. To do this, he created a version of Lisp explicitly tailored to writing text editors, and created a version of Emacs to run under his hypothetical OS, called GNU.[4] So while Scheme and Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp appear very different, they have at their hearts the same DNA. Hmm, I guess I did have a lot to say about it. Sorry 'bout that. [1] Or a Honeywell 6180 or follow-on. Anyway, a 36-bit Multics system. [2] Sure, TECO is an editor. But real TECO is Turing-complete. [3] OK, OK, IMAO. [4] GNU's Not Unix. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Is this around anywhere? That sounds delightful. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Thank god [sic] the C64 has no 640 KB barrier :-) -- Jaque Moreau ----------

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: It's reprinted in "The BYTE Book of Pascal", of which I have a copy. If there isn't an online version already, I could scan it for you, but it'll probably be a while before I can get to it. Alexey

Yeah, sorry...I missed noting the September issue. The August part was just an intro blurb without much content. -----Original Message----- From: Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:20:29 To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'<cctalk at classiccmp.org> Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: RE: LISP [was RE: John McCarthy] From: Dave McGuire Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 10:03 PM [quoting me:] The August, 1978, issue (always the language issue, in those days) covered Pascal. Tiny Pascal was presented in the September, October, and November issues that same year. It was republished in _The BYTE Book of Pascal_. That should help someone track it down. It doesn't seem to be on-line. Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: That's precisely the resource I alluded to previously. I was in Jr High and "only" had a Quest Elf (an 1802 with 256 bytes of RAM and toggle switches) and a 32K PET + datasette. Not much of what was in that issue made sense to me until much later. Great stuff to read now, though. -ethan

From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> Odd that this should come up now. I sent Dave (hello, Dave!) a link to the Tiny C package including a paper by Dennis Ritchie last week. I have these BYTE issues but nowhere to host them. If someone wants to give me an FTP site I can upload the 3 whole issues or I can extract just the Tiny Pascal stuff and try to make a PDF out of it. A couple of guys were hosting a ton of BYTE scans. I don't know if the links are still any good but if anybody wants them, let me know and I'll post them on this list. -- +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Vintage Coder America Online ivagntrpbqre at nby.pbz <ROT13> | | | | Collecting: DOS assemblers, compilers, & books (Z80, M68K, 6502, 808X) | | Software & doc for IBM S/360 through OS/390 | | | | Wants: Ada 95 compilers for MVS/ESA & Solaris SPARC | | PL/I X Optimizing Compiler for MVS, APL/SV for MVS | | Stony Brook Modula-2 for Solaris SPARC | |---------------------------------------+--------------------------------| | Powered by Slackware 64 Intel and Solaris 10 SPARC | |=======================================+================================| | PGP Key 4096R 0x1CB84BEFC73ACB32 Encrypted email preferred | | PGP Fingerprint 5C1C 3AEB A7B2 E6F7 34A0 2870 1CB8 4BEF C73A CB32 | +------------------------------------------------------------------------+

If nobody comes up with a place to host the 3 full issues in the next few days, I'll try to make a PDF and email it to you.

On 10/31/2011 10:33 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: I can host as much of that sort of stuff as you want here. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On Oct 31, 2011, at 8:15 AM, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: I'll be glad to host them. If you can SFTP, respond privately and I'll give you a location (or if you can share with Dropbox, so much the better). - Dave

From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> Yeah I figured the best way to reach you is on this list ;) And congrats on the new job! I got everything I could find which is from the 1st issue September 1975 until December 1986 with almost no gaps. Without dupes it's 37G. Part 1 : August 1978 : Vol 03 Number 08 Part 2 : October 1978 : Vol 03 Number 10 Part 3 : November 1978 : Vol 03 Number 11 Dave if you already have this and can host it, let us know. If not, I'll start going through the list of people who have offered to host it in chronological order and see if they can help.

I believe the source code files are available in this Yahoo group. Other info below. Google found a lot of info, too. - John To: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com In-Reply-To: <20060221200039.94993.qmail at web32502.mail.mud.yahoo.com> X-Originating-IP: 68.142.201.182 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:12:0:0 From: Ed Davis <ed_davis2 at yahoo.com> X-Yahoo-Profile: ed_davis2 Sender: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com; contact UCSDPascal-owner at yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com List-Id: <UCSDPascal.yahoogroups.com> Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:UCSDPascal-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com> Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:33:47 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: [UCSDPascal] Tiny Pascal Reply-To: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: --- Eric Scharff wrote: Get a copy of the Byte Book of Pascal. You can get it used for $10 or so. It appears to contain the complete sources. On the web, I've found the following: 1) http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/CPMUG/CPMUG050.ARK This is an implementation for CP/M. The source for Tiny Pascal is in a non standard Pascal dialect. It claims to compile itself, however. Translates to p-code. There is no p-code interpreter, but there is a p-code to 8080 machine code translator. While this one does not mention Chung's and Yuen's version, it is obviously derived from it, as it uses some of the same p-code extensions, and compiles pretty much the same Pascal subset. 2) http://cq-pan.cqu.edu.au/david-jones/Projects/rcos/software/rcos.zip This is an implementation for MS-DOS. Only translates to p-code. Tiny Pascal is written in Pascal, and the documentation says that it was translated from the Northstar Basic sources. I would be interested to hear about anything you come up with or do regarding Tiny Pascal! To: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com References: <20060221200039.94993.qmail at web32502.mail.mud.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20060221200039.94993.qmail at web32502.mail.mud.yahoo.com> User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 3.2.5 X-Originating-IP: 66.37.197.102 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:12:0:0 X-eGroups-From: willi at allvantage.com From: willi at wilserv.com X-Yahoo-Profile: wilserv_41 Sender: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com; contact UCSDPascal-owner at yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com List-Id: <UCSDPascal.yahoogroups.com> Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:UCSDPascal-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 02:23:25 -0500 Subject: Re: [UCSDPascal] Tiny Pascal Reply-To: UCSDPascal at yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: Hi! Quoting Eric: KMMM Pascal had its genesis in Tiny Pascal. The early versions of KMMM Pascal were based on Tiny Pascal so I paid a royalty to Chung and Yuen. At some point all component parts of KMMM Pascal were coded in assembly language. KMMM Pascal was available for the Commodore PET a few years before the C64 was released. I got my hands on a C64 shortly after it was released and discovered that the ROMs in the C64 weren't much different than those in the PET. So it took me just a couple of weeks to get the C64 version of KMMM Pascal working. Willi

if you like you can place them here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tandy2000/files/ you'll have to join first though my website is in "the process" indiscreetlogic.com. I'd be happy to host them there, but as I said, it's not open to the public, yet. --- On Mon, 10/31/11, vintagecoder at aol.com <vintagecoder at aol.com> wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:59 PM Subject: Re: John McCarthy you." Interesting quote comparing Common Lisp with an anime (Howls Moving Castle). The anime is made by one of the legendary studios within the genre (Studio Ghibli). So I guess it would be a great complement to the language. My favourite Subaru is the Imprezza and any sports car has to be driven in manual gears to get the most pleasure out of driving it - just don't go from 5th gear to 1st, whilst at high speed!!! Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On 02/11/11 1:17 PM, Liam Proven wrote: I think that is overstating the case. Again, I don't see the purpose of the metaphor; they only seem to harden people's uninformed opinions - the kind of lazy short-circuiting ("You mentioned Lisp, so let's make a parenthesis joke, even though I haven't ever written any Lisp" / "Omg Haskell, that monad stuff is craziness, I'll stick with PHP thanks" / "Oh no, I can't use Scheme for this, it's TOO SLOW") that seems to happen far too often in this business already. I recently began reading Paul Graham's "On Lisp" (a comprehensive and very approachable manual to Common Lisp macros, with a lot of good general advice throughout*), and found that the parts of Common Lisp that I expected to find crufty turn out to be not so bad. I see no reason to write it off as a baroque monstrosity, yet, and certainly won't do so without taking it for a good long country drive (as I am now trying to do with Scheme). --Toby * - Peter Norvig's Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style is also indispensable for any programmer, not just Lisp programmers. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1098

On 02/11/11 9:55 PM, Liam Proven wrote: As hyperbole, it's useless; and what truth can it contain that wouldn't be better found by direct experience? I can only think of one way to find out... This is the kind of rubbish you can read on Reddit or Slashdot comments any day of the week. Why not form your own opinion? --Toby

On 3 November 2011 04:28, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Fair point, but in support work, which is what I mainly do, you pretty much have to use whatever tools are already there on your customers' machines. You can't install your own all the time - partly for licencing reasons, partly for time reasons, partly because on a partly-screwed-up machine that might make things worse. As such, I have always focussed on learning to make the best use of the standard tools on various OSs that I support, rather than on customising them to suit myself. It's no help if my /own/ box is /just so/, just the way I like it - I earn my living setting up and fixing other people's boxes. Mind, for 15y I did carry around a small but slowly-growing library of write-protected disks which contained a whole assortment of tools for me to use - from Norton to anti-virus scanners to various handy little extra tools. Eventually it became a library of CDs, then a USB stick, and now, even that is rarely used - I pull down what I think they need from the Web. (Ninite.com is a wonderful time-saver in this regard.) As for editors, when MS-DOS 5.0 came out, I was able to junk Edlin and go to EDIT.EXE - and I really /really/ liked it. It is still one of my very favourite text editors to this day. Never found a Linux editor quite as good, although SETedit came very close - but it is no longer maintained and doesn't run on modern distros. This makes me very sad. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Nov 2, 2011, at 9:55 PM, Liam Proven wrote: Well, I'm sure that there are kernels of truth everywhere, but I'd like to at least point out that Scheme, being very small and simple, is easily embeddable as a scripting language. As with most scripting languages (Lua comes to mind), you often make a trade-off between execution time and code size; TinyScheme, for example, may not be the fastest thing out there, but it compiles down to a few K (maybe tens of K, I don't quite recall), which is great if you're running on embedded devices. It sees quite a bit of real-world use in that aspect. - Dave

----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 5:17 PM Subject: Re: John McCarthy of Castle). (Studio in from I have never heard of the novel and Hayao Miyazaki works for (or owns?) Studio Ghibli. Sorry, I misinterpreted what you were after. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk