Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder2.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Peter Flass Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Little old machines, The joy of FORTH (not) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:25:38 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 27 Message-ID: <888627095.751666735.944426.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> References: <590075033.751599779.234047.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2024 22:25:39 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="8e62155d990432d9571fc50721f10397"; logging-data="4068602"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+235TsQcCVTSbTmef3I+U8" User-Agent: NewsTap/5.3.1 (iPad) Cancel-Lock: sha1:TbPKf6ecDqJxKkviySewdv/XE4c= sha1:1qqCAEmaSa2t4R/9OrjGdU4mGU8= Bytes: 2168 John Levine wrote: > According to Peter Flass : >>> My first computer was a 12K (BCD charactersw) IBM 1401 running FORTRAN IV. >>> Better compiler writers in those days... > > Luxury! Mine was a PDP-8 with 4K 12-bit words and low speed paper tape. It had > a Fortran system but it wasn't worth the effort. We mostly used FOCAL, which > was sort of a cut down Joss, and a homebrewed Trac interpreter. > >> OK, I surrender. Somewhere I have a book about the first FORTRAN compiler >> for (I think) the 704. Those guys were geniuses. > > You're probably thinking of Abstracting Away the Machine, self-published > by Mark Jones Lorenzo. It's pretty good. Yes, thanks. > > Even by modern standards the original Fortran compiler generated very respectable > code. If could do loop merging, turning two nested loops into one when the indexes > were used in simple enough ways. > -- Pete