C, please die,

[Rich Alderson]

From: Peter Corlett
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2014 11:07 AM

> On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 10:42:02AM -0700, ben wrote:
> [...]
>> PL/1 anyone?

> Its Wikipedia page puts me in mind of some of the more ill-advised
> dark corners of Perl combined with the flexibility of Pascal.

Pl/I (nee PL/1, but the spelling changed with the Optimizing and
Checkout compilers) is (was?) immensely flexible.  I wrote a utility in
it for the UChicago Computation Center which took as its input an SVS
JCL deck (for the Amdahl V7) and output an equivalent MVS deck (for the
3031 which was to replace the Amdahl system).

And Pascal was flexible enough that I was able to write a disassembler/
dump program for PDP-10 binaries whose output was acceptable input to
Macro-20 (or Macro-10, but I wasn't working on Tops-10 at the time).
I did that work before the JCL utility.

I don't pretend to have explored all the dark corners of Perl, but I
first learned it in order to add features to Bugzilla.  Later, I used it
for exploratory forensic programming when decoding DECtapes images which
had intentionally been obscured.

One of these days I should probably learn C and Python.  Or not.

                                                                Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/