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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 22:36:36 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:43:06 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Assembler can be fun.
>> 
> Especially PDP-10 assembler. Wonderful instruction set.

In those days, machine instruction sets were designed for humans to 
program in. Machine families like the PDP-10 and PDP-11 were highly 
regarded for being refreshingly free of seemingly arbitrary and capricious 
restrictions that tended to plague prior designs just to make the hardware 
easier to implement.

The acme of this trend was, of course, the DEC VAX. And also a 
microprocessor design that tried to copy that richness of instruction set, 
the 32x00 family from Western Electric.

Unfortunately some spoilsports discovered that such complex instruction 
sets were suboptimal when it came to actual performance. And furthermore 
that well-designed compilers could routinely generate better code than any 
mere human assembly-language programmer.

And so the good times ended ...














.... doesn’t mean we can’t still play, though ...