strangest systems I've sent email from

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-05-18 3:17 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>> On May 18, 2016, at 2:44 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 18 May 2016, John Willis wrote:
>>> Let's not forget that the bulk of the Apple Lisa operating system and
>>> at least large parts of the original Macintosh system software were also
>>> implemented in Pascal (though IIRC hand-translated into 68k assembly
>>> language), which was a pretty big mainstream success for proving
>>> Pascal as suitable for developing systems software.
>>
>> At the time, it was sometimes interpreted differently:
>> "Apple hired brilliant people for the project.  BUT, they had so little real-world experience that they didn't even realize what a mistake it would be to write an OS in a high level language.
>
> What a bizarre statement, given that there was plenty of precedent for doing so very successfully.
>
> It might be a valid statement if made much more nuanced, say by
talking about the slowness of the processors, or the inefficiency of the
particular compilers used. But clearly there had been successful (large
scale) operating systems written in high level languages well before the
Mac.

There were very many; the Brinch Hansen book, "Classic Operating 
Systems" contains many examples. Some languages used before 1974 were 
even better suited than C to this purpose.

Do people think computers didn't exist before 1974?!

--Toby

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> 	paul
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>