Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: geodandw Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 17:41:18 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 17 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 23:41:18 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="2dd65fee8d0231f6bf5f51211fb1643b"; logging-data="1493866"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18bHi4t1Fhs5CeN9BGpyEieEyE+DsKZw5A=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:lsjTY+iNnz4+p0wUDirTKCOPnzE= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 1988 On 9/28/24 17:20, 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. > If you like getting security exploits due to buffer overruns.