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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 21:20:11 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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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.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly