6 Nov
2006
6 Nov
'06
3:38 p.m.
On 11/7/06, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Chris M wrote:
I had the "enjoyable experience" to be the first seasoned programmer
to join a small company that was doing work on the PDP-11 and the
PC-AT. Most of _my_ work was in PDP-11 and 80286 assembler, but the
main guy was in his first programming job of his career and did
everything in Pascal. :-P
The company was mapping out a switch to C for a variety of good
reasons, but unfortunately, due to external causes (not the choice of
Pascal), they went out of business before we started the transition.
At that company, I learned several times over why Pascal is not my
favorite language.
-ethan
what were these routines writtenw in originally?
(C
presumably I suppose, though one could only wonder why
they werent written in assembly TBW)
MOST of the Lisa software seems to have been written in Pascal.
Part of Job's "we want the next (sic) generation, NOT a repeat of what we
already have!" philosophy that caused him to hire some CS graduates with
NO experience in order to get a fresh approach. Some of them didn't even
know that current Pascal compilers were designed for TEACHING programming,
and did not produce output suitable for real world. 
6 Nov
6 Nov
11:32 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
At that company, I learned several times over why
Pascal is not my
favorite language.
They don't call it a teaching language for no reason :-)
I've got good memories of Turbo Pascal on the PC though, but then I suppose
Borland did outfit it with a lot of features to make it more reasonable. Being
able to drop into assembler sure was handy, too. I have no good memories of
the Pascal environment on the Mac, though (afraid I don't remember if that was
Apple's own variant or a third party's, but it sure was horrible)
5:23 p.m.
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Yeah, but the best languages are repurposed and modified to do things
that their designers never imagined.
Look at what happened to Perl. How many people do Practical Extraction
and Reporting with it? It reinvented itself multiple times through the
90's.
BASIC has also mutated into forms completely unimaginable
in Dartmouth timesharing. I despise lots of the mutations, but
it is far from dying out!
While the original Pascal was indeed useless beyond classroom
exercises, it had enough spirit that it caught on in a
couple areas.
While I can name a couple of odd areas that COBOL made it into
(believe it or not, compilers were written in COBOL) and Smalltalk
lives on in a few odd corners completely unrelated to language
research, those "caught ons" are minor compared to the areas
that Pascal did succeed at.
Tim.
At that company, I learned several times over why
Pascal is not my
favorite language.
They don't call it a teaching language for no reason :-) 
6:22 p.m.
On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Tim Shoppa wrote:
While I can name a couple of odd areas that COBOL made
it into
(believe it or not, compilers were written in COBOL) and Smalltalk
lives on in a few odd corners completely unrelated to language
research, those "caught ons" are minor compared to the areas
that Pascal did succeed at.
I took a class taught by a professor who would constantly talk about a new
form of COBOL coming soon called COOL for COBOL Object Oriented Language.
Does anyone here know what this is/was?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
6:41 p.m.
no, but I think there is an OO form of FORTRAN known
as F. You gotta love FORTRAN
--- David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
I took a class taught by a professor who would
constantly talk about a new
form of COBOL coming soon called COOL for COBOL
Object Oriented Language.
Does anyone here know what this is/was?
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7:02 p.m.
Chris M wrote:
no, but I think there is an OO form of FORTRAN known
as F. You gotta love FORTRAN
Well after they dropped Sense Switches FORTRAN* has never been the
same. In many ways FORTRAN is more machine dependant than you think
since FORTRAN compliers range from the the PDP-8 to the PDP-10 and that
is about as different in hardware range as they come.
*PS Real Fortran has version numbers not years like 77 or 90.
7:17 p.m.
--- woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
Chris M wrote:
You mean like Wat IV or V or, IIRC, FORTRAN IV and
such. Those are the years the specs were written. You
can call a compiler whatever you want, but it helps to
know with which spec it's compliant.
GCC at last check only supported F77 stuph. Funny..
I recently obtained, with docs, IBM Pro FORTRAN 1.0
by Ryan-McFarland (not M$), truely F77 compliant
(unlike M$'s version). But the manual says this is to
the best of IBM's ability to ascertain. But I guess
caveats like that apply w/o anything being said.
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no, but I think there is an OO form of FORTRAN
known
as F. You gotta love FORTRAN
Well after they dropped Sense Switches FORTRAN* has
never been the
same. In many ways FORTRAN is more machine dependant
than you think
since FORTRAN compliers range from the the PDP-8 to
the PDP-10 and that
is about as different in hardware range as they
come.
*PS Real Fortran has version numbers not years like
77 or 90.
9:10 p.m.
On 6 Nov 2006 at 17:02, woodelf wrote:
Well after they dropped Sense Switches FORTRAN* has
never been the
same. In many ways FORTRAN is more machine dependant than you think
since FORTRAN compliers range from the the PDP-8 to the PDP-10 and that
is about as different in hardware range as they come.
As in:
IF (SENSE SWITCH 3) 130,240
?
Lessee, if you punch a "B" in column 1, the expression is a boolean
one; an "I" makes it complex arithmetic. And mixed-mode expressions
are a big no-no.
At least that's what I remember from 7090 FORTRAN II (running under
FMS).
Yeah, I guess FORTRAN went downhill when they deprecated the PRINT
and PUNCH statements...
Cheers,
Chuck
Was is READ TAPE n and WRITE TAPE n? It's been way too long...
7:06 p.m.
Chris M wrote:
no, but I think there is an OO form of FORTRAN known
as F. You gotta love FORTRAN
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fortran-faq/
Try the FAQ.
8:17 p.m.
At 06:22 PM 11/6/2006, David Griffith wrote:
I took a class taught by a professor who would
constantly talk about a new
form of COBOL coming soon called COOL for COBOL Object Oriented Language.
Does anyone here know what this is/was?
Object-Oriented COBOL. As in Cobol .NET. All the GUI goodness with all
of COBOL's verbosity.
Nifty code segments like
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
INVOKE "segText" OF addForm "SetFocus".
(Equivalent to addForm.SegText.SetFocus() in other languages)
and
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 DOC-NAME.
05 DOC-OFFICE PIC X(5).
05 DOC-DOCUMENT PIC X(10).
05 DOC-SEGMENT PIC X(10).
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
INVOKE POW-SELF "CallForm" USING "findBoilerForm".
IF DOC-OFFICE NOT = SPACES
MOVE DOC-OFFICE TO "Text" OF "officeText" OF addForm
MOVE DOC-DOCUMENT TO "Text" OF "docText" OF addForm
MOVE DOC-SEGMENT TO "Text" OF "segText" OF addForm.
(i.e. addForm.segText.Text = DOC-SEGMENT, etc.)
Yes, I've used this quite successfully to migrate some "legacy" VMS
code to Windows.
-Rick
10:46 p.m.
Rick Murphy wrote:
At 06:22 PM 11/6/2006, David Griffith wrote:
Not to play down COBOL.net, but IBM has had Enterprise
COBOL for some
time, which is OO COBOL.
Jim
I took a class taught by a professor who would
constantly talk about
a new
form of COBOL coming soon called COOL for COBOL Object Oriented
Language.
Does anyone here know what this is/was?
Object-Oriented COBOL. As in Cobol .NET. All the GUI goodness with all
of COBOL's verbosity.
Nifty code segments like 
6 Nov
6 Nov
6:35 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
While I can name a couple of odd areas that COBOL
made it into
(believe it or not, compilers were written in COBOL)
and Smalltalk
lives on in a few odd corners completely unrelated
to language
research, those "caught ons" are minor compared to
the areas
that Pascal did succeed at.
I had thought there were more lines of code written
in Cobol then in any other language (up until a
certain point anyway, maybe ~2000 A.D). All that
business stuph running on Big Blue iron and whatnot.
Wasn't Smalltalk the first OO language? I conversed
with a dude who did some work w/another early OO
language, Modula-2. He wrote a BBS program for a '286
utilizing hi-performance serial cards (many of which
had onboard 80186's) that could handle 6,000
simultaneous chatters in 256 rooms. Tried to sell it
to GEnie, but they decided on using some mini for the
task.
Delphi ain't too bad from what I hear. That's Pascal.
And has a visual environment that's probably as good
as VB's or better. Pascal does have strange tokens
though...
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6:54 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
In article <20061106233518.87488.qmail at web61023.mail.yahoo.com>,
Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> writes:
Wasn't Smalltalk the first OO language?
Probably the first language designed explicitly as supporting an
object oriented programming style, although object oriented
programming styles can be adopted for almost any procedural language.
Its possible to write OO style assembly language, for instance.
You're just managing all the object instance plumbing yourself.
I conversed
with a dude who did some work w/another early OO
language, Modula-2.
Modula-2 wasn't OO. It was procedural with modules (hence the
"modula"). It was an attempt to rectify the shortcomings of Pascal
and influenced things like Ada.
Delphi ain't too bad from what I hear. That's
Pascal.
Delphi is Pascal with object oriented features tossed in explicitly.
And has a visual environment that's probably as
good
as VB's or better. Pascal does have strange tokens
though...
Delphi has basically been killed by .NET -- at a recent code camp
event, the local Delphi user group dude was there and he said as much.
Delphi's visual oriented design was good and provided a VB6 like "RAD"
approach to building applications. They (Borland) carried this over
to Borland C++ Builder, essentially using the Pascal object plumbing
in C++ with language extensions but it didn't quite ever take off beyond
the Borland enthusiasts. C# now does the equivalent in a better way, IMO.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
7:35 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
--- Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
Modula-2 wasn't OO. It was procedural with
modules
(hence the
"modula"). It was an attempt to rectify the
shortcomings of Pascal
and influenced things like Ada.
A quick search indicates there were oo extensions. I
don't know which implementation the guy was using
(I'll have to find out) but I doubt he would say so if
it weren't. Wirth was responsible for it also. Didn't
know that.
Delphi has basically been killed by .NET
So how about Kylix? Being that Linux is inherently
anti-M$, I would imagine there is a fervor for it, and
one not likely to disappear.
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7 Nov
7 Nov
3:47 a.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
Richard wrote:
Acorn were huge fans of it at one time and used it heavily for OS work. I
think that's the only place I've come across it being used, personally. I
wonder if any other company ever tried to use it for OS development...
Turbo Pascal supported all sorts of OO features, though - I've never figured
out quite what Delphi brought to the table.
cheers
Jules
I conversed
with a dude who did some work w/another early OO
language, Modula-2.
Modula-2 wasn't OO. It was procedural with modules (hence the
"modula"). It was an attempt to rectify the shortcomings of Pascal
and influenced things like Ada. Delphi
ain't too bad from what I hear. That's Pascal.
Delphi is Pascal with object oriented features tossed in explicitly.
12:56 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
In article <45504818.7000604 at yahoo.co.uk>,
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
Turbo Pascal supported all sorts of OO features,
though - I've never figured
out quite what Delphi brought to the table.
Their framework class library, VCL.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
6 Nov
6 Nov
9:04 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
On 6 Nov 2006 at 15:35, Chris M wrote:
I had thought there were more lines of code written
in Cobol then in any other language (up until a
certain point anyway, maybe ~2000 A.D). All that
business stuph running on Big Blue iron and whatnot.
Don't knock COBOL. It's a targeted-purpose language that has some
very powerful features not quite duplicated in other langauges (well,
maybe PL/I).
Or, to put it bluntly, how does one do a MOVE CORRESPONDING in Modula-
2?
Cheers,
Chuck
9 Nov
9 Nov
11:49 a.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
On Nov 6, 2006, at 6:35 PM, Chris M wrote:
I had thought there were more lines of code written
in Cobol then in any other language (up until a
certain point anyway, maybe ~2000 A.D). All that
business stuph running on Big Blue iron and whatnot.
"Stuph"? There are pills for that now, you know.
Wasn't Smalltalk the first OO language? I
conversed
with a dude who did some work w/another early OO
language, Modula-2. He wrote a BBS program for a '286
utilizing hi-performance serial cards (many of which
had onboard 80186's) that could handle 6,000
simultaneous chatters in 256 rooms. Tried to sell it
to GEnie, but they decided on using some mini for the
task.
I don't recall Modula-2 being OO...?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
8:19 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
I think "stuph" is related to
"1337". :)
Nah, the occasional mispelling is a result of viewing
all the goofiness on the net. Kind of rubs off yer
know. And in fact, it took me about 30 seconds to
figure out that 1337 is leet encoded, as in elite (I
guess). I do believe the yahoo "hacker's lounge" had
the caption "where the 1337 meet" IINM. Now it makes
sense finally. So as you can see I'm not a student of
any of that crud.
John Allain posted something about peeps (ah there I
go again) reverting to older hardware for practical
purposes (unlike most of the discussion here ...
right?). Alleviating the distractions caused by the
web. I think that's what I need to do. Stick with
something old. I might feel better.
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8:09 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
--- Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
I don't recall Modula-2 being OO...?
Neither do I. I don't even remember Modula-2. But it
was claimed by this person that "it" was oo. I don't
know what implementation of the language he was using,
but I'll find out. Stay tuned ;)
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Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
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9:12 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
On 9 Nov 2006 at 17:09, Chris M wrote:
Neither do I. I don't even remember Modula-2. But
it
was claimed by this person that "it" was oo. I don't
know what implementation of the language he was using,
but I'll find out. Stay tuned ;)
There is an ISO OO set of extensions for Modulat-2, as well as Modula-
3 (I don't hink it's ISO, but more a DEC set of object extensions).
The main idea behind Modula-2 was modularity (as you'd guess from
the name). There is also some nice sugar, like coroutines, monitors
and interrupts, as well as bit manipulation.
Anyone remember that Logitech (the mice people) used to have quite a
Modula-2 operation?
Many programmers I knew had a brief dalliance with Pascal (and
extended dialects thereof), played with Modula-2 a bit and generally
settled down with dirty old C. We hired one of Logitech's compiler
people and he never made much of a fuss about doing his work in C
instead of Modula-2. Never even tried to sell us on it. Maybe it
was having to type ":=" for assignment operations... :)
Cheers,
Chuck
10 Nov
10 Nov
12:32 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
In article <20061110010905.76201.qmail at web61025.mail.yahoo.com>,
Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> writes:
--- Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
wrote:
Modula-2 most definatley wasn't object-oriented. It was a procedural
language on steroids. Later extensions, sure, but not standard
Modula-2.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
I don't recall Modula-2 being OO...?
Neither do I. I don't even remember Modula-2. But it
was claimed by this person that "it" was oo. I don't
know what implementation of the language he was using,
but I'll find out. Stay tuned ;)
1:04 p.m.
New subject: Cobol and such was Re: Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)
On 10 Nov 2006 at 10:32, Richard wrote:
Modula-2 most definatley wasn't object-oriented.
It was a procedural
language on steroids. Later extensions, sure, but not standard
Modula-2.
The problem, as in C, is the old "Which Modula-2"? Except that it's
worse.
There's the so-called "PIM" Modula-2, which, like K&R C, follows the
language described in a book written by Wirth, "Programming in Modula-
2". But there were several editions of this book, each describing a
slightly different language.
ISO tried to pull the language into a more-or-less standard form with
well-defined behavior, but the language described by the ISO standard
is somewhat different from that described in the PIM editions.
Something like ANSI C.
But ISO also described optional extensions to the language, and one
of those is a number of OO constructs.
So, if the question is "Does standard Modula-2 contain OO
extensions?", the answer is "yes--but it's not the language Wirth
described."
But then K&R doesn't describe ANSI C, either. :)
A very interesting open-source version of ISO Modula-2 exists for x86
that also allows the programmer to freely mix in Oberon statements:
http://www.excelsior-usa.com/xdsx86.html
Cheers,
Chuck
6 Nov
6 Nov
5:43 p.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
> At that company, I learned several times over why
Pascal is not my
> favorite language.
They don't call it a teaching language for no
reason :-)
I've got good memories of Turbo Pascal on the PC though, but then I
suppose Borland did outfit it with a lot of features to make it more
reasonable. Being able to drop into assembler sure was handy, too. I
have no good memories of the Pascal environment on the Mac, though
(afraid I don't remember if that was Apple's own variant or a third
party's, but it sure was horrible)
All I remember from Pascal programs I have seen is that every thing
is 1 large program. I/O is from the punched card era and every body
handles SETS differently. Did any one ever use TINY Pascal?
.
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bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
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