The Error log analyzer in RSX-11 is in Bliss-11, as is the serial-line-transfer utility (name escapes me at the moment, XFER?) that came with RT-11. Sources to a BLISS-11 compiler are in DECUS entry 10-213, available on DECUS library tape DECUS-10-LIB-4 in the [43,50325] directory. See http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/ if you don't already have all the DECUS-10 library tapes. The Bliss-11 on the DECUS tape is not quite the same as the Bliss compiler used to build the tools I mentioned, but is an earlier version. I think internal to DEC the version of the Bliss compiler that ran on a VAX and cross-compiled to the PDP-11 was called Bliss-16. Tim.

On 15/08/2005, at 5:40 AM, Paul Koning wrote: I always wonder why people think BLISS is such a bad language. I know that many people inside DEC don't like it as they were forced to use it as the new "standard" language but personally BLISS is one of my favorites. I'm more than happy to hear why others think BLISS is so bad. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

On 15/08/2005, at 9:11 PM, John Allain wrote: OK, from my viewpoint (based a lot on BLISS-10 but I've done BLISS-32 programming as well). Good features (IMHO) 1) No GOTO - probably the first systems programming language to be designed without one. 2) Generated good code - considerable emphasis was made to ensuring that BLISS-10 could be used to replace assembler. 3) Everything is an lvalue. BLISS uses the "." operator to get the contents of an lvalue. So what in most other languages would be written as i := i + 1 becomes i := .i + 1, unless of course you want to put the address of the location after i into it. This of course, led to lots of stupid programming errors, my favorite one (and one that lead to lots of interesting effects) was a bit of code that read something like WHILE work EQ 1 DO lots of code OD Of course, given that this code effectively said, while the address of work is 1 do "lots of code" lead to the optimizer eliminating lots of dead code and a very small executable :-) Everything as an lvalue works backwards to the way c does it and allows you to do really neat stuff with indirect addressing. It makes call by value and call by reference far more obvious. Combined with user defined structures (see point 4) this allows very elegant structure manipulations. 4) User defined structures. You can set up a structure to define data structures. This is very analogous to c struc. 5) Modules. BLISS was designed from day one to support modules and all the necessary things to allow them to be linked against each other. 6) Co-routines were part of the language. Of course, I don't think I ever used this but it's there. 7) Macro processing is built in, not an add-on. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

On 15/08/2005, at 11:03 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Wulf et al. wrote an article describing BLISS-10 which was published in CACM. A quick google gives http://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv.com?BLISS-ARTICLE as one place it can be downloaded from. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

On 15/08/2005, at 11:12 PM, Paul Koning wrote: I agree that missing .'s did cause some problems but I recall having to debug far fewer missing .'s compared to missing equal signs in c. The number of times I've written if (a = b) when I mean if (a == b) is the main reason I refuse to write c programs (not even for money). Well the everything is an lvalue is different, but in some ways it's easier to explain i := .i + 1 to new programmers than i := i + 1 where the context of i changes (it's even worse in FORTRAN where the syntax is i = i + 1 given that FORTRAN was written for maths/physics types.... Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

Seen in July "Nuts and Volts". Still at my local Barnes & Noble (they must be getting slow). http://www.nutsvolts.com/toc_Pages/jul05toc.htm http://www.nutsvolts.com/toc_Pages/images/0507/8.jpg Quite a few pictures in the paper mag., in color too. John A.

<c chat> A way to force-check putting ='s in if()'s is to switch the LHS and the RHS, like so: if ( j+1 = j) and if (callfunc() = k) won't compile, but if ( j+1 == j) and if (callfunc() == k) will. </c chat>

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, John Foust wrote: It certainly is NOT algebra! In algebra, N = 0 N = N + 1 would be an inductive proof that all integers are equal. That would cause an immediate cessation of the universe as we know it (and replacement with something even weirder?) Therefore, NEVER show that to a mathematician. The difference between equality and assignment can be a tough one for beginning programmers to master. It would make life easier to use the left arrow, as APL does, instead of the "equals sign" for assignment. ... or the N := N + 1, or MOV N, N + 1 , or even the LET N = N + 1 , as used by Kurtz and Kemeny in their early versions of BASIC.

On 16/08/2005, at 2:29 PM, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: Thank goodness there's someone else who had exactly the same problems I did. I just thought I was stupid or something :-) The issue I had was teaching FORTRAN to first year Maths students. No amount of contrived explanations helped - the standard one being comparing variables to street numbers and how the house at number 74 could contain many different things. Even after 25 years or so it still seems a poor analogy. Getting over this conceptual difficulty is one of the reasons for teaching assembly language programming in CS courses but that's an argument that's basically lost now - teach them java, VB whatever's the current fad language (oooh, asbestos suit time now - also drifting off topic). Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Fred Cisin wrote: Variable reassignment is a new-fangled idea. Mathemeticians would once have corrected you: i' = i + 1 variable values never changed, it would be considered an error. Clearly programmatic convenience took over in comipiler tradition. And I disagree i = i + 1 is not always obvious: if ( i = i + 1 ) ... If i represents a logical variable or function or subroutine, then then result is false. Modern languages assume that any non-zero value is true, but that's not the case for all languages, and "true plus one" or "false plus one" would generate a compiler error. Even if you assume i is a numeric variable, and a numerical value of zero is logically false, then the statement will be true for a large number of values of i, depending on word length, how many representations zero has in the machine (1's comp? 2's? float? normalized?) et cetera... PS: I'm no purist, I prefer perl; I simply acknowledge I'm swimming in shit.

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Tom Jennings wrote: Sorry, but I was NOT the one who said that. Probably Sellam. I DO see how it is not obvious, since I teach beginning programming students. Students who are SO beginning, that N = N + 1 is NOT obvious. Many of them are actually otherwise intelligent, but they have not learned how to think procedurally, and have been trained to think that '=' means that two expressions are interchangable with each other. And, therefore, if N is interchangable with 1 N = 1 AND N is interchangable with N + 1 N = N + 1 then, by "inductive logic", all integers are equal! That would result in the immediate cessation of the universe as we know it (and probably replacement with something even weirder). thereby wasting the most important capability of a variable! if you mean that as IF (I .EQ. (I + 1) ) . . . then the distinction between assignment and equality is significant. We also must not forget numeric representations come into play. float X; /* as IEEE 32 bit single precision */ X = 2147483648.0; if (X == (X + 1)) . . . can come out as TRUE!! (again: do NOT show that to a mathematician!) ... the only thing as common as Hydrogen and stupidity! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Crap, I'm an idiot: float X; /* as IEEE 32 bit single precision */ int n; X = 2147483648.0; n= 0; while (X == (X+1)) { printf "fa la la...\n"; ++n; X= X + 1; } print ("%f combobulates %d fa la la's.\n", X, n);

Thrivial example... On most (if not all) calculators, try something like 1 E 20 [enter] 1 + 1 E 20 - (Ooops, that's in RPN, I've forgotten how to do it on a normal calculator, try soemthing like 1 E20 + 1 = - 1 E 20 = ) Explain why the result is not 1 (OK, we all know the answer here...) And hope nobody has an HP49, which does this _symbolically_ and gives the exact answer... More interesting, why do some lesser calculators apparently give the right answere if you do 1 / 3 = * 3 = ? And why do I object to such designs ? SIN((\pi) in radians is another favorite of mine, any calculator which gives 0 is useless, unless it's doing it symbolically (the sine of 3.1415926535.. truncated to a finite number of digits is _not_ zero. There is no justification for assuming that said truncated number carries on as \pi) Another example, taken from the HP15C 'Advanced Functions Handbook' (one of the few manuals for a pocket calculator that explains why the machine sometimes gives the wrong answer!). For non-negative numbers, sqrt and x^2 are inverse operations. Enter any number, take the sqaure root 100 times in succession. Now square the result of that 100 times. For numerical (as opposed to symbollic) calculators, you'll get an answr of 0 for inputs such that 0<=x<1, and 1 for inputs such that x>=1. -tony

Um, people...note the extra levels of quoting? How the relevant quote, instead of being one level of quoting more than the "Fred Cisin wrote", is two more beyond that? That seems to me like a fairly clear indication that Fred *didn't* write it, but rather *quoted* it - or more likely quoted someone else quoting it. /~\ 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

Fred Cisin wrote: Hang on a minute, does anyone *really* find the use of "=" as assignation, and "=" as equivalence, in *any way* confusing? I had managed to get my head round that when I was eight years old! You can't seriously sit there and tell me that university students have trouble grasping that... Gordon.

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Tim Shoppa wrote: I know. And if you want to leave a unix shell and you type "exit", you then have to press Enter to do it. My mind is crushed under the weight of the illogicality of it all!!! -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

. . . and you go "UP" to get to the "root" ? . . . and you can't see the background through an open window ?

Tim Shoppa wrote: Well, they cribbed from the best. I like to annoy Macintosh zealots by reminding them that, for over a decade, you put a file in the Trash to delete it, but when you put a disk in the Trash, it... pops out of the machine. One would assume putting a disk in the Trash would format/erase it. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/ A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/ Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.338 / Virus Database: 267.10.12/77 - Release Date: 8/18/2005

On 19/08/2005, at 2:08 PM, Jim Leonard wrote: I remember my mother nearly hitting me when I did that to eject a floppy off her Mac - she was really worried that I was about to delete all the French assignments she had written (she used to teach French and these were class exercises). For a machine were considerable work went into designing the human computer interface, this one is slightly strange. I see even with Mac OS-X that this still works, it's just that the trash can icon changes to be a disk eject icon. Some would argue that the Mac interface hasn't got better over the years, but there's no arguing that the engine underneath certainly has. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

Vintage Computer Festival wrote: That could probably be arranged. 8-> Peace... Sridhar

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:00:54 -0400 shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com (Tim Shoppa) wrote: You click 'start' to start the shutdown sequence. Pressing a button to 'stop' the computer is the old way, on non-multitasking computers. It wrecks havoc on filesystems, data structures, etc.

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: The problem remember is some langauges like C and FORTRAN have boolean variables and that is the problem with = and .EQ. or '=='. Good old BASIC don't.

On 8/15/05, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: And here I though he forgot to put "LET" in front of "i=i+1". Either that or he forgot the colon in i:=i+1; :)