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From: Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2024 13:15:01 -0700
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> According to The Natural Philosopher  <tnp@invalid.invalid>:
>> The need to speed up BASIC was why I learnt Assembler...
> 
> Dartmouth BASIC on the GE 635 compiled your program into machine code
> and then ran it, so it was pretty snappy.  The compiler was so fast that
> it wasn't worth keeping the objsct code around.  They didn't have a linker
> until they added a PL/I compiler that was as slow as PL/I compilers are.
> 
> All this running 100 users on a machine the size of the KA-10 PDP-10.
> 
>> Then I moved onto C, and that was the best of both worlds really
> 
> C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than any of the
> plausible alternatives at the time.
> 

C was/is great for the low-level systems stuff, but then it started getting
used for everything, and getting stuf added to greatly complexity it.

-- 
Pete