Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: The Natural Philosopher 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 Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: <1142817911.749332013.853906.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 14:10:19 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="2efc34bfa98cee095ea5c8bf6ba9396f"; logging-data="2302815"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+mwCP2K527OIRdrBty9okohPqHFmp06aY=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:nQNp5auQ1mtWxdGKUmUufPOBqII= In-Reply-To: <1142817911.749332013.853906.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> Content-Language: en-GB Bytes: 2561 On 29/09/2024 21:15, Peter Flass wrote: > John Levine wrote: >> According to The Natural Philosopher : >>> 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