[Info-vax] Viable versus ideal programming languages

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 3/23/22 15:24, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <ja113lFj1nhU1 at mid.individual.net>,
> Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Define today's standards.  :-)
> 
> Language standards published any time this century.  :-)

Language standards with what purpose?  :-)

> 
>> Certainly not ANSI but some of us don't really care.  K&R was
>> good enough to develop one of the most prevalent OSes in use
>> today.  What more is needed?
> 
> Unix systems of today don't use K&R C, and with good reason.  I
> did a port of 7th Edition to the 68010 with a 68451 MMU a few
> years ago, and updated the code to ISO C11.  Just adding
> prototypes found bugs.

Probably would have been found with lint if someone had bothered
to try.  But, take any of the packages available today (start
with GNU stuff) turn on all the warnings and stand back and watch
just how is ignored on their production versions.  Programmers
seem to have this feeling that warnings (and even errors if you
can convince the compiler to ignore them) are OK if you don't
see them and the easiest way to do that is don't look.

> 
>> As for the other languages.  I run the same Fortran that was in
>> use on everything from minis to mainframes.  Full Pascal on both
>> the Z80 and 6809.  Same COBOL that ran on Primes, Univac 1100, RSX,
>> RSTS, and even VMS.  And a version of BASIC on the 6809 that is
>> far beyond the BASIC that came out on the PC years later. And APL
>> by its very nature is a perfect fit for these systems. There were
>> a number of other languages, PILOT, Smalltalk, Lisp etc. but they
>> weren't really any more successful on bigger machines.
>>
>> I wonder how much of this notion that small systems aren't useful
>> for anything but playing games contributed to companies like DEC
>> missing the boat when the micro world came along.
> 
> You can certainly do all kinds of useful stuff on small systems,
> but in this day and age it begs the question: why?  Aside from
> an interesting academic exercise, I don't much see the point
> of a hosted environment on a z80 or 6809, particularly when a
> Raspberry Pi Zero costs $5 or something and gives you so much
> more.  Use those devices as a _target_ platform for something?
> Sure.  But a host?  Why bother?

Because I already have them.  Because I like nostalgia.  Other
reasons I'm sure.  Oh, and I use the Pi and Arduinos as well.
But they just aren't as much fun.  Lately I have been thinking
about tasking another look at Amoeba.  Imagine what could be
done with an Amoeba cluster of Pi's.  :-)

bill