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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 22:28:46 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 28/09/2024 22:20, John Levine 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.
> 
As far as I was concerned it was heaven. Assembler but 10x faster to 
actually write.
And the way it used local variables was magic. Very hard to use the 
stack as a scractc pad in assembler - you have to keep track of so many 
offsets

I started out on BDS C which had sever limitations, not the least was 
promoting everything 8 bit to 16 bit to do comparisons etc.

And simply 'compiler confused - giving up' on many more advanced 
declarations.

But I wrote quite a bit in that.

Then I moved on to PCS and C on an IBM PC was way faster.



-- 
“it should be clear by now to everyone that activist environmentalism 
(or environmental activism) is becoming a general ideology about humans, 
about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and 
the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a 
'noble' idea. It is not an honest pursuit of 'sustainable development,' 
a matter of elementary environmental protection, or a search for 
rational mechanisms designed to achieve a healthy environment. Yet 
things do occur that make you shake your head and remind yourself that 
you live neither in Joseph Stalin’s Communist era, nor in the Orwellian 
utopia of 1984.”

Vaclav Klaus