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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: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:10:19 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 29/09/2024 21:15, Peter Flass wrote:
> 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.
> 
Well yes. But you get around that by writing powerful well documented C 
libraries, so that complex operations become a simple function call.

-- 
"Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and 
higher education positively fortifies it."

    - Stephen Vizinczey