[HECnet] Thrashing about...

[dwe-6006 at philtest.org]

I would have thought that ALGOL had a larger market share than APL which was available. On the other hand, the charge for the special character ROMs might have tipped the decision 😊

 

Dave

 

 

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Paul Koning
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2018 12:19 PM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Thrashing about...

 

 





On Jul 16, 2018, at 10:22 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com <mailto:clemc at ccc.com> > wrote:

 

...

We were were discussing at lunch one day, I don't think DEC thought there just was much of a market, particularly once Pascal showed up. >From the same discussion, one of the compiler implementors said (remember DEC charged for its compilers so renumeration was an important factor when they decided to build one - so it had to make money of they were to build it):  "I don’t recall any serious discussion of an internal DEC Algol compiler project on the PDP-11, VAX or Alpha at DEC.  To the best of my recollection, the only serious users of Algol were British, and the language is a pain in the neck to implement, with lots of performance land-mines."  

 

Program managers have to estimate the business case for anything they do, and it's an imperfect science.  But still, those statements are not signs of careful analysis.  "Lots of performance land-mines"?  Not so.  Call by name is a simple function call.  Sure, if you use it when you don't need it your code slows down, but that's no different from the performance hit you get in C++ if you put "virtual" on functions that don't need it.  In general ALGOL is no harder than PASCAL.

 

As for "only serious users" -- it's not clear to me whether that's being said about ALGOL 68 or ALGOL 60.  If 68, then maybe, though CDC found enough business for it to sell the compiler (which was developed in Holland).  If ALGOL 60, that's a different thing entirely; it was widely used in Europe starting around 1962, and of course it's also the implementation language of the Burroughs 5500 mainframe system.  For that matter, CDC, IBM, and probably others sold ALGOL 60 compilers.

 

              paul

 

 

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