[HECnet] Thrashing about...

[Keith Halewood]

Algol68 was Betamax to Pascal and Ada’s VHS. The former was technically superior and the other two just easier to deal with…. That’s how I feel anyway.

Algol68 had ‘Mode’ as a generalisation of type, encompassing value, reference (variables), the triple reference. A truly liberal approach to ‘pointers’ able to point to locations on the stack or on the heap with only the most natural restriction and garbage collection. I really enjoyed the ability in Algol68 to slice and trim multi-dimensional arrays any way I wanted… and the VAX/VMS compiler doing a pretty good job of handling the details in its generated code. Who needed call by name when you could pass routine texts (procedure/function bodies) as parameters to procedures and functions. No restrictions on ‘function’ results either. The RSRE compiler interfaced to VMS quite naturally – the CALLS/CALLG convention happened automatically and there were modifiers for call by immediate value, STRUCTnCHAR modes for less liberal string handling possible in runtime libraries. I/O (transput) formats were fun but there was no parallel processing – I didn’t really miss that anyway. The use of triple REFs….. joyous.

And yes, Algol68 RS was the result of work at RSRE in Malvern. The compiler exists in one form as a part of Ella and generates C source code. It’s not nice.
I have contacted Altran who apparently adopted the software output from RSRE. Attempts to contact them have resulted in silence.

I’ll continue to try from time to time.

Keith


From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Alex van Denzel
Sent: 16 July 2018 20:05
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Thrashing about...


Op ma 16 jul. 2018 00:45 schreef Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com<mailto:clemc at ccc.com>>:


On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 4:54 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net<mailto:paulkoning at comcast.net>> wrote:

Algol68-RS?  That's not familiar.  I don't remember Algol 68 from DEC.

I do remember using Algol 68 at the University of Twente, circa 1985, on a DEC2060 (TOPS10). I don't know the make or model. And on the Algol 60 note, I have a set of papertapes for ROGALGOL for a PDP-8 (and some documentation for it)

--
Alex.


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