Help reading a 9 track tape

[Paul Koning]

> On Aug 2, 2021, at 4:14 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 8/2/21 12:19 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>>> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist.  I received the tape from
>>> one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
>>> around 1978 at SLAC.
>>> 
>>> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
>>> at CERN on the CDC 6600.  My understanding is that he more or less
>>> insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high
>>> level languages would just get in the way and slow things down.
>> Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid assessment.  CDC Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran  is not the obvious answer for implementing interpreters or other language processors, which this sounds like.
> 
> Some might argue with you about that.  PL/M was done in Fortran IV.

Interesting.  So was IBM Fortran H, if I remember right.  And I talked to a DEC engineer who built an expression parser in COBOL.  Still, these are not the usual case.

	paul