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Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416517 is a reply to message #416494] Wed, 07 September 2022 04:41 Go to previous messageGo to next message
John Levine is currently offline  John Levine
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Registered: December 2011
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Senior Member
According to Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca>:
> _Some_ implementations of ALGOL, including IBM's implementation for the
> System/360, annoyed potential users by not using reserved words (as Algol W
> did) but instead requiring that all keywords in the language be enclosed in
> single quotes. I think that may be underrated as a cause for the failure of the
> language to be widely adopted.

IBM Algol F seemed to me to be a product that existed purely so they could
check the box yes, we have Algol.

As distributed by IBM, every time your program entered a block it would do
a GETMAIN system call and a FREEMAIN when it left the block. Needless to
say that was a disaster for performance. Someone at Princeton patched it
to allocate and free in larger more sensible chunks.

The quoted keywords were the same sort of thing, technically correct and
horrible in practice.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416518 is a reply to message #416512] Wed, 07 September 2022 06:56 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Bob Eager

On Tue, 06 Sep 2022 19:58:34 -0700, Quadibloc wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 6, 2022 at 12:31:42 PM UTC-6, Peter Flass wrote:
>> Robin Vowels <robin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Monday, September 5, 2022 at 9:50:00 PM UTC+10, Quadibloc wrote:
>
>>>> _Some_ implementations of ALGOL, including IBM's implementation for
>>>> the System/360, annoyed potential users by not using reserved words
>>>> (as Algol W did) but instead requiring that all keywords in the
>>>> language be enclosed in single quotes. I think that may be
>>>> underrated as a cause for the failure of the language to be widely
>>>> adopted.
>
>>> I think that most implementations used apostrophes to delimit
>>> keywords.
>
>> No other implementation I ever saw, admittedly only a few: mostly
>> Burroughs and Algol W - just looked at HP - and maybe a couple of
>> others. That alone would make me never want to get near the language,
>> it seems like a recipe for disaster.
>
> I'm not too familiar with the other examples, but I think some early
> ones for British computers were like that.

The IMP language [1] (nothing to do with ARPAnet) developed at the
University of Edinburgh had a different stropping convention. This worked
well with the line reconstruction algorithm (inherited, sort of, from the
Compiler Compiler).

A reserved word started with a '%' character and ended with whitespace.
For example:

%begin ... %end

You could split words as long as the '%' character was introdiced, so:

%const %integer and %constinteger

were equivalent.

I know this because I have just written an IMP compiler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_IMP




--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416519 is a reply to message #416518] Wed, 07 September 2022 07:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Andy Walker

On 07/09/2022 11:56, Bob Eager wrote:
> You could split words as long as the '%' character was introdiced, so:
> %const %integer and %constinteger
> were equivalent.

The Walgol* compiler went further and tried to be helpful by
completing words if it could. The trouble was that many of our students
couldn't spell, and "proceedure" turned into "procedure e do until real"
which was far more confusing than simply giving an error message in the
first place. It was a great relief when Algol 68 arrived, and the word
was spelled "proc", which even the wonkiest spellers could manage.
____
* I think it was Walgol, which we used for batch processing of student
jobs. But it could have been Egdon, which we also used at some stage.

--
Andy Walker, Nottingham.
Andy's music pages: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music
Composer of the day: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music/Composers/Couperin
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416520 is a reply to message #416519] Wed, 07 September 2022 13:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bill Findlay is currently offline  Bill Findlay
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Registered: January 2012
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On 7 Sep 2022, Andy Walker wrote
(in article <tfa0ou$gq$1@gioia.aioe.org>):

> The Walgol* compiler went further and tried to be helpful by
> completing words if it could. The trouble was that many of our students
> couldn't spell, and "proceedure" turned into "procedure e do until real"
> which was far more confusing than simply giving an error message in the
> first place. It was a great relief when Algol 68 arrived, and the word
> was spelled "proc", which even the wonkiest spellers could manage.
> ____
> * I think it was Walgol, which we used for batch processing of student
> jobs. But it could have been Egdon, which we also used at some stage.

Walgol? I think not, see:

> /Users/wf/KDF9/emulation/Testing: cat Whetstone/WALKER.a60
> WALKER|
> _b_e_g_i_n
> _p_r_o_c_e_e_d_u_r_e eh; ;
> _e_n_d
> |

> /Users/wf/KDF9/emulation/Testing: walgol WALKER
> This is ee9 9.0p, compiled by GNAT 12.1.0 on 2022-09-06.
> Running the KDF9 problem program Adjuncts/KMW0201--UPU in fast mode.
> ____________________________________________________________ ________
> [q]
> OUT;N.|
> ee9: OUT 5: requested a #02 type and got TR1 in Latin-1 mode.
> [m] WALKER|
> [m] FAIL
> [m] RAN/EL/000M01S/000M03S SIZE 2
> ____________________________________________________________ ________
> TP0: ===
> FAIL 126 LINE 2 DELIMITER ;
> RAN/EL/000M01S/000M03S SIZE 2
> ===
> /Users/wf/KDF9/emulation/Testing:

FAIL 126 is "illegal underlined word".

--
Bill Findlay
PDP-10 had PL/I???? [was Re: "In Defense of ALGOL"] [message #416521 is a reply to message #416516] Wed, 07 September 2022 15:49 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Rich Alderson is currently offline  Rich Alderson
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Robin Vowels <robin.vowels@gmail.com> writes:

> OK, other implementations of PL/I language included
[ snip ]
> DEC System 10 and 20
[ snip ]

Details?

I went from being a PL/I programmer on OS/360 to SVS to MVS, and latterly moved
to TOPS-20 on a DEC-20. The rest of my career (~40 years) was spent on the
latter architecture, and I've NEVER HEARD OF PL/I FOR THE PDP-10.

Had I know it existed, I'd have badgered management anywhere I worked for it.
Relentlessly.

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen
Re: PDP-10 had PL/I???? [was Re: "In Defense of ALGOL"] [message #416522 is a reply to message #416521] Wed, 07 September 2022 16:08 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Robin Vowels is currently offline  Robin Vowels
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Registered: July 2012
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Senior Member
On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:49:08 AM UTC+10, Rich Alderson wrote:
> Robin Vowels <robin....@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> OK, other implementations of PL/I language included
> [ snip ]
>> DEC System 10 and 20
> [ snip ]
>
> Details?
>
> I went from being a PL/I programmer on OS/360 to SVS to MVS, and latterly moved
> to TOPS-20 on a DEC-20. The rest of my career (~40 years) was spent on the
> latter architecture, and I've NEVER HEARD OF PL/I FOR THE PDP-10.
>
> Had I know it existed, I'd have badgered management anywhere I worked for it.
> Relentlessly.
..
You needed to ask for CPL.
The publication is decsystem10 Conversational Programming Language
User's Manual, DEC-10-LCPUA-A-D, 1975.
Re: PDP-10 had PL/I???? [was Re: "In Defense of ALGOL"] [message #416523 is a reply to message #416521] Wed, 07 September 2022 16:50 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Peter Flass is currently offline  Peter Flass
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Registered: December 2011
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Rich Alderson <news@alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:
> Robin Vowels <robin.vowels@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> OK, other implementations of PL/I language included
> [ snip ]
>> DEC System 10 and 20
> [ snip ]
>
> Details?
>
> I went from being a PL/I programmer on OS/360 to SVS to MVS, and latterly moved
> to TOPS-20 on a DEC-20. The rest of my career (~40 years) was spent on the
> latter architecture, and I've NEVER HEARD OF PL/I FOR THE PDP-10.
>
> Had I know it existed, I'd have badgered management anywhere I worked for it.
> Relentlessly.
>

I think it was under development, but I don’t think it was ever released.
Robin mentioned CPL, which was a conversational PL/I subset, like INM’s
CPL. I believe at least one of the LCM systems has it. I’d like to get the
source, although, being MACRO-10 it’s fairly useless, but I’ve never had
the time or energy to try to extract it.

--
Pete
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416526 is a reply to message #416511] Wed, 07 September 2022 19:10 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel is currently offline  Anne &amp; Lynn Wheel
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Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
> Precisely because Pascal became very popular, and offered everything
> that Algol-60 did, with important additions, the alternative of sticking with
> Algol-60 instead, if one didn't like Algol-68, wasn't a common choice.

IBM Los Gatos VLSI lab was using Metaware's TWS for various projects
.... some ref by Metaware's founders:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/69622.357187

then the lab used it for ibm mainframe (370) pascal implementation that
they used for developing VLSI tools ... eventually it becomes VS/Pascal
and was used to implement original mainframe tcp/ip stack. I also used
it for a number of other internal applications and projects.

The IBM communication group was fiercely fighting off client/server and
distributed computing trying to preserve their dumb terminal paradigm
and install base ... and were also trying to block release of mainframe
tcp/ip ... when they lost that battle, they claimed that since the
communication group had corporate responsibility for everything that
crossed datacenter walls ... it had to be released through them. What
shipped got 44kbytes/sec aggregate using nearly whole 3090 processor.
I then did the "enhancements" to support RFC1044 and in some tuning
tests at cray research between ibm 4341 and cray, got 1mbyte aggregate
sustained using only modest amount of 4341 processor (something like
500 times improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed).

IBM Palo Alto was then doing a port of USC BSD to IBM mainframe and
needed a C compiler ... one of the LSG VLSI people responsible for
VS/Pascal was working on C language frontend for the VS/Pascal backend
... but had recently left for Metaware ... and I got Palo Alto to get
mainframe C compiler from Metaware. Palo Alto was then directed to shift
and do the BSD port to IBM's PC/RT workstation ... and they got Metaware
to do a 801/RISC (ROMP) backend for the C compiler.

a couple past (a.f.c.) posts mentioning metaware
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2016c.html#62 Which Books Can You Recommend For Learning Computer Programming?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#71 What terminology reflects the "first" computer language ?

Then in the IBM troubles in the 1st half of the 90s, IBM was
transferring lots of VLSI tools to industry tool vendors (but they all
had to be ported to SUN since that was the industry standard
platform). I had already left IBM, but get an (IBM) contract to port
50,000 pascal statement VLSI physical layout app to SUN. In retrospect,
it would have been simpler to have rewritten in C ... I'm not sure that
SUN pascal had been used for anything other that entry computer
classes. While SUN hdqtrs was just down the road and easy to drop into
.... SUN had outsourced their pascal support to an operation 12 time
zones away ... and everything took at least overnight.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416529 is a reply to message #416519] Thu, 08 September 2022 06:01 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Bob Eager

On Wed, 07 Sep 2022 12:54:06 +0100, Andy Walker wrote:

> On 07/09/2022 11:56, Bob Eager wrote:
>> You could split words as long as the '%' character was introdiced, so:
>> %const %integer and %constinteger
>> were equivalent.
>
> The Walgol* compiler went further and tried to be helpful by
> completing words if it could. The trouble was that many of our students
> couldn't spell, and "proceedure" turned into "procedure e do until real"
> which was far more confusing than simply giving an error message in the
> first place. It was a great relief when Algol 68 arrived, and the word
> was spelled "proc", which even the wonkiest spellers could manage.

I learned Algol on an Elliott/ICL 4130. That had a 24 bit word and 6 bit
character code. The compiler only looked at the first four letters of a
(stropped) word. My dyslexic fellow postgrad always used 'UNTILL'.

Then we moved to a new machine and the excellent Edinburgh Algol. He had
a lot of editing to do.




--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416530 is a reply to message #416516] Thu, 08 September 2022 07:08 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Robin Vowels is currently offline  Robin Vowels
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On Wednesday, September 7, 2022 at 3:10:01 PM UTC+10, Robin Vowels wrote:
> On Sunday, September 4, 2022 at 10:42:05 AM UTC+10, Rich Alderson wrote:
>> Robin Vowels <robin....@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>
>>> PL/C was a pretty good implementation, and fast .
>>> Other non-IBM PL/I compilers included those for
>>> CDC, Univac, Burroughs, and on micros DR PL/I, Q1/Lite PL/I.
>> I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the GE/Honeywell PL/I compiler which
>> was used as the implementation language for much of Multics...
> .
> OK, other implementations of PL/I language included
> IBM Series/1, Burroughs B 6700 / B 7700, CDC Cyber 70, 170, 6000,
> Data General Eclipse, DEC System 10 and 20, Honeywell 66/6000,
> Q1 Corporation Q1/LMC and Q1/Lite, PLUM, SP/k compilers,
> PLAGO, Student PL/I, IBM 1130, CIMS PL/I, Olivetti A7, DR PL/I,
> Wang PL/I.
..
and Univac 1100 series, and 1106, 1108, and 1110.
..
> (In addition to the above GE/Honeywell PL/I, of course).
> .
> IBM produced the PL/I-F compiler for OS/360, and the PL/I-D compiler for smaller
> machines using DOS, and the PL/I Checkout and Optimising compilers,
> plus a number of others since.
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416531 is a reply to message #416520] Thu, 08 September 2022 07:13 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Anonymous
Karma:
Originally posted by: Andy Walker

On 07/09/2022 18:54, Bill Findlay wrote:
[I wrote:]
>> The Walgol* compiler went further and tried to be helpful by
>> completing words if it could. The trouble was that many of our students
>> couldn't spell, and "proceedure" turned into "procedure e do until real"
>> which was far more confusing than simply giving an error message in the
>> first place. [...]
> Walgol? I think not, see:
>> /Users/wf/KDF9/emulation/Testing: cat Whetstone/WALKER.a60
>> WALKER|
>> _b_e_g_i_n
>> _p_r_o_c_e_e_d_u_r_e eh; ;
>> _e_n_d
[...]
> FAIL 126 is "illegal underlined word".

OK, but:

(a) Is that the version of Walgol that we would have been using ~1970?
I can imagine that there would have been enough complaints that what
initially seemed a Good Idea would have been changed after a year or
two.

(b) We were using punched cards, no underline, so apostrophe stropping.
Might that make a difference? [We also didn't ever get things like
"FAIL 126" -- every compiler I have ever used gave proper error
messages! Unlike those editors which just say "?"!]

If neither (a) nor (b) applies, then the "blame" switches to Egdon ....

--
Andy Walker, Nottingham.
Andy's music pages: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music
Composer of the day: www.cuboid.me.uk/andy/Music/Composers/Pridham
Re: "In Defense of ALGOL" [message #416533 is a reply to message #416531] Thu, 08 September 2022 08:51 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bill Findlay is currently offline  Bill Findlay
Messages: 286
Registered: January 2012
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Senior Member
On 8 Sep 2022, Andy Walker wrote
(in article <tfcioq$1a7n$1@gioia.aioe.org>):

> On 07/09/2022 18:54, Bill Findlay wrote:
> [I wrote:]
>>> The Walgol* compiler went further and tried to be helpful by
>>> completing words if it could. The trouble was that many of our students
>>> couldn't spell, and "proceedure" turned into "procedure e do until real"
>>> which was far more confusing than simply giving an error message in the
>>> first place. [...]
>> Walgol? I think not, see:
>>> /Users/wf/KDF9/emulation/Testing: cat Whetstone/WALKER.a60
>>> WALKER|
>>> _b_e_g_i_n
>>> _p_r_o_c_e_e_d_u_r_e eh; ;
>>> _e_n_d
> [...]
>> FAIL 126 is "illegal underlined word".
>
> OK, but:
>
> (a) Is that the version of Walgol that we would have been using ~1970?

Perhaps there was a homemade variant.

> I can imagine that there would have been enough complaints that what
> initially seemed a Good Idea would have been changed after a year or
> two.
>
> (b) We were using punched cards, no underline, so apostrophe stropping.
> Might that make a difference? [We also didn't ever get things like
> "FAIL 126" -- every compiler I have ever used gave proper error
> messages! Unlike those editors which just say "?"!]
>
> If neither (a) nor (b) applies, then the "blame" switches to Egdon ....

I used EGDON ALGOL intensively. It did not do what you describe.

--
Bill Findlay
Re: PDP-10 had PL/I???? [was Re: "In Defense of ALGOL"] [message #416542 is a reply to message #416522] Thu, 08 September 2022 16:55 Go to previous message
Rich Alderson is currently offline  Rich Alderson
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Senior Member
Robin Vowels <robin.vowels@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 5:49:08 AM UTC+10, Rich Alderson wrote:
>> Robin Vowels <robin....@gmail.com> writes:

>>> OK, other implementations of PL/I language included
>> [ snip ]
>>> DEC System 10 and 20
>> [ snip ]

>> Details?

>> I went from being a PL/I programmer on OS/360 to SVS to MVS, and latterly
>> moved to TOPS-20 on a DEC-20. The rest of my career (~40 years) was spent on
>> the latter architecture, and I've NEVER HEARD OF PL/I FOR THE PDP-10.

>> Had I know it existed, I'd have badgered management anywhere I worked for it.
>> Relentlessly.

> .
> You needed to ask for CPL.
> The publication is decsystem10 Conversational Programming Language
> User's Manual, DEC-10-LCPUA-A-D, 1975.

Ah. CPL. I thought you meant a full PL/I compiler.

Never mind, thanks.

--
Rich Alderson news@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen
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