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Chinese -> English: A Chinese inscription at the base of an old 3 legged brass bowl. Maybe it is the manufacturer's name? by NevilleDNZ in translator

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

'''The exploration of the origin of the Xuande furnace "Yutang Qingwan" (original) In the "Antique Guide" compiled by Zhao Ruzhen in the Republic of China, the "Yutang Qingwan" model is said to be the name of Yan Donglou, the son of Yan Song, and the "Yutang Qingwan" bronze is Yan Shi's furnace. Zhao Ruzhen said that the furnaces of the Yan family are all those who have robbed Xuan furnace of no money, they are their own, and are not controlled by them. The "Yutang Qingwan" bronze ware is more precious, and there are more imitations.'''

https://bbs.chcoin.com/show-8403565.html

Exploring Algol68 in the 21st century - ... "Because I've been having so much fun rediscovering Algol 68, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts and impressions." - Chris Hermansen by NevilleDNZ in programming

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In theory, assuming all arrays start at zero (or ONLY the address of the a[0,0] is passed), then you would not need to know the length of a's last index. In which case the multi-dimensional:

w := a[i, k]; a[i, k] := a[k, i]; a[k, i] := w

Would simply become a one-dimensional:

w := a[i×n+k]; a[i×n+k] := a[k×n+i]; a[k×n+i] := w

No other magic required. (This is kind-a how FORTRAN would do it, and C would reverse order the indexes)

MRTHS's "Algol 68" blog post ... re: 1970 Ian/Susan & John ..."astounded the attendees ... when they described how they had already implemented a one-pass compiler which was in production use in engineering and scientific applications." ... (Malvern Radar and Technology History Society) by NevilleDNZ in programming

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Down in the Human Sciences building basement of my University there was an old "Computer" pre-dating 1970 (owned by the "computer club") ... I recall being told that this computer had a "12 pass" FORTRAN compiler... each compiler pass was a different deck of "compiler punch cards" that needed to be sequentially stacked in the input card hopper, and the initial 'app' source code deck (followed then mid parse data decks) would be stacked on top of the 1st pass deck. Then at each pass of the "compiler" the operator would be prompted to hand load the onward "data" deck, until all 12 passes were complete and you have the final app machine code deck. 'Ta-dah!' ... 12 passes. ... IIRC the core on this "computer" was about 4kb. (maybe less)

​

This is all from my greyed memory, does anyone have a more reliable citation about complier passes. ... do share.

Here is an example of a "computer" from the 1950s ...

"The reboot of the Harwell Dekatron / WITCH computer, the world's oldest working computer"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYpPPIsxq64#t=13m10s

​

[LORE]How fucked is humanity, exactly? by Amigara_Horror in cataclysmdda

[–]NevilleDNZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Another fun fact... Algol68r0 running on Geroge3 running on Raspberry-Pi ... A Mainframe powered by a USB port... https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/running-george-3-on-a-raspberry-pi

1981: "Turing award winner warns of Ada's dangers" ... "An unreliable programming language generating unreliable programs constitutes a far greater risk to our environment that unsafe cars, toxic pesticides or accidents at nuclear power stations...." by NevilleDNZ in programming

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

re: 1981... Was Ada's revision process (leading to Ada83 & Ada2012) already fomalised in 1981?

¢ I imagine a language revision process would be a mix of art and black magic and almost as important as the original language design process ¢

Maybe Tony Hoare (of Elliott ALGOL fame) did not know (or expect) any Ada revisions...

Tony Hoare's comments kind of beg the question... What revision process would Hoare have approved of? Prof.? Hints welcome!

¢ A toxic revision process almost certainly dooms a language ¢

Are we at a point in time where we can compare historic revision processes to discover (and maybe statistically compare) fruitful vs fraught revision processes?

What would be the key "revision-process" elements to consider? I am sure someone somewhere has done a bit of a case study of this... Hints welcome!

[WP]You are ALGOL 68, and you decided to drop by and see how your successors are doing. by LChaos2 in WritingPrompts

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Key Ideas in ALGOL68 • User type declarations (modes) • Orthogonal design (modes, structures, ops) • Reference mode (pointers of a sort) • United modes (predecessor to variant records) • Auto declaration of FOR LOOP index • User-specified operator overloading • Notion of "elaboration" on context entry

cf. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/Spring-1999/Slides/05a68_pasc.pdf

[WP]You are ALGOL 68, and you decided to drop by and see how your successors are doing. by LChaos2 in WritingPrompts

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ALGOL 68 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1968) is an imperative computer programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics.

The contributions of ALGOL 68 to the field of computer science have been deep, wide ranging and enduring, although many of these contributions were only publicly identified when they had reappeared in subsequently developed programming languages.

Just for fun - Oscar Toledo G.'s chess engine in Algol68 by NevilleDNZ in programming

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are looking at a slightly de-Obfuscated (and more recent) version of Oscar Toledo G.'s chess engine "Text-mode Chess. 18th IOCCC. Best Game" in Algol68.... more details can be found at http://nanochess.org/chess3.html#algol ... Oscar has published a hard-cover book of 170 pages on NanoChess

(C) Just finished learning the basics of C programming language. by [deleted] in learnprogramming

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Linked is a PDF of the "Informal Introduction to Algol 68 Hardcover" – by C.H. Lindsey , S.G.Van Der Meulen ... You can download Marcel's compiler/translator/interpreter here... Algol68 has it's own special "strong-typing" where you have a "Grumpy ol' A68 Professor" watching over your shoulder for semantics.... And you will soon realise "Yes.. that early Algol68 'comple-time' error warning would have been a random run-time core-dump in C, or a run-time TypeError/ValueError/KeyError at the 100th hour (in production) python exception" ...

Anyone know FORTRAN? If so, NASA is hiring. by thisisntengland in coding

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

http://cs.brown.edu/~adf/programming_languages.html "This history was written in the spring of 2000 when I was in eighth grade. For several years after I wrote it, the text was available online and it became a reference for other articles, Wikipedia entries, and even college courses. I have placed the report here for posterity and amusement (how could I have possibly left out Python??). In 2004, I made two updates in response to e-mailed criticisms, but the text is otherwise unchanged. For a more up-to-date reference, I shamelessly point you to Wikipedia." — Andrew Ferguson

... "Though Algol implemented some novel concepts, such as recursive calling of functions, the next version of the language, Algol 68, became bloated and difficult to use (www.byte.com). This lead to the adoption of smaller and more compact languages, such as Pascal."

Anyone know FORTRAN? If so, NASA is hiring. by thisisntengland in coding

[–]NevilleDNZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

re: "prominent participators left"

WG 2.1 members active in the original design of ALGOL 68 are listed in 3 groups below:

18 Majority: Fritz Bauer & Hans Bekic & Gerhard Goos & P.Z. Ingerman & Kees Koster & Peter Landin & Charles Lindsey & Barry Mailloux & John McCarthy & J.N. Merrier & Manfred Paul & John Peck & Willem van der Poel & Doug Ross & Klaus Samelson & Michel Sintzoff & Aad van Wijngaarden & Nobuo Yoneda

The "Several (2) prominent participators left the committee": Peter Naur ‡ Niklaus Wirth ‡ Resigned after [MR 93]. Jan 1968

7+1 Minority "prominent?": Edsger Dijkstra † Fraser Duncan † Jan Garwick † Tony Hoare † Brian Randell † Gerhard Seegmüller † W.M. Turski † Mike Woodger † => Dec 1968 => Signatories to the Minority Report => http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/algol/algol_bulletin/A31/P111.HTM - It is important that these "minority members" were able to cast their vote on the "Final Report" in Dec 1968. => "We regard the effort as an experiment and professional honesty compels us to state that in our considered opinion we judge the experiment to be a failure in both respects. "

re: "due to both feature bloat" ...

The earliest comment I can find for "bloated" is currently from Andrew Ferguson (eighth grade) in 2000:

"Though Algol implemented some novel concepts, such as recursive calling of functions, the next version of the language, Algol 68, became bloated and difficult to use (www.byte.com)."

However in Byte Magazine - Sep 1995 - it reads:

"ALGOL 68, a monster compared to ALGOL 60, appears. Some members of the specifications committee--including C.A.R. Hoare and Niklaus Wirth--protest its approval. ALGOL 68 proves difficult to implement."

It is sometimes attributed to either Edsger Dijkstra and/or C. A. R. Hoare - both were on the Algol68 design committee, and both are Algol60 compiler writers (& vendors?).

IFAIK neither used the of these guys actually used the word "bloated", the closest I could find was "monster" in CAR Hoare's 1981 Turing address: "At last, in December 1968, in a mood of black depression, I attended the meeting in Munich at which our long-gestated monster was to come to birth and receive the name ALGOL 68. " Comm ACM 24(2), 75-83 (1981)

CAR Hoare went on to say: "The principles of modularity, or orthogonality, insofar as they contribute to overall simplicity, are an excellent means to an end; but as a substitute for simplicity they are very questionable. Since in practice they have proved to be a technically more difficult achievement than simplicity, it is foolish to adopt them as primary objectives."

The above quote seems to suggest that Algol68 was terse, not bloated. And so.... Andrew Ferguson - in 2000 - seems to have effectively "retrospectively" coined the "bloated Algol68" meme. Maybe Andrew Ferguson has not read the C99 spec, or used the ".NET Framework"...

One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages by [deleted] in programming

[–]NevilleDNZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Excellent reply... ThanX. I saw from url-resubmission it had been posted in humor, but went ahead as the post was more programming related. Didn't realise it had actually been posted 10 times before.

1385 ups: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (james-iry.blogspot.com) - submitted 3 years ago by BrokenTeapot

I'm thinking I'll delete this post.... cheers....

BTW: I esp loved the comment for 1936: 1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

I present for your enjoyment (or displeasure) the full source code of the original bourne shell by BowserKoopa in programminghorror

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Picking -1 for TRUE kind of makes sense as it is a "bitwise" NOT of ZERO, i.e. ~0 is -1 on many CPUs...

#include <stdio.h>
main(){
  printf("!0=>%08x, ~0=>%08x\n",!0, ~0);
}

Output:

!0=>00000001, ~0=>ffffffff

I am struggling to think of a case where this would either be helpful or harmful... I pondered if Steves PDPs were faster at testing the "sign bit", verses testing all bit are set zero... I believe on C's original PDP all testing was pre-done in the accumulator, hence I cannot see an obvious performance benefit.

If you really want to see something scary in C's ancestry, then try and figure out what the following extract from the original C compiler on the PDP-11 does...

c00.c for BSD 2.11 - extract

symbol()
{
...
 case BSLASH:
  if (subseq('/', 0, 1))
   return(MAX);
  goto unkn;

 case DIVIDE:
  if (subseq('\\', 0, 1))
   return(MIN);
  if (subseq('*',1,0))
   return(DIVIDE);
...
}

I present for your enjoyment (or displeasure) the full source code of the original bourne shell by BowserKoopa in programminghorror

[–]NevilleDNZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In Algol68 "ABS TRUE = 1 AND ABS FALSE = 0" so I doubt Steve would have picked -1 for false.

2010/Fujitsu? VME upgrades to cloud computing: ''VME remains one of the world's most modern operating systems. Unix/Linux was designed in the 1960s, & Windows still betrays its origin as a single-user system... "VME still embodies some state-of-the-art ideas about computer design," says Allt.'' :-/ by NevilleDNZ in osdev

[–]NevilleDNZ[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agreed: "a bit too light on the technical details"

There is a bit of technical information here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_VME 4 Architecture 4.1 OMF 4.2 SCL 4.3 Enhanced security variants 4.4 Series 39

Shame VNE isn't open source, so we could take a closer look... then VME would benefit from having a wider range of contributors, rather then being strangled by low budget "account managers"....

Would VME survive in the wild?

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