18 Dec
2020
18 Dec
'20
3:18 a.m.
On 17 Dec 2020, at 14:44, Mike Markowski
<mike.ab3ap(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/17/20 9:21 AM, M Douglas McIlroy wrote:
Now that I understand ;-)
...My knowledge of A68 comes from reading the
official definition back in
the day. It took effort to see the clarity of the design through the
fog of the description. Until more accessible descriptions came along
(which I admit to not having seen) it would have been a big barrier to
acceptance...
By coincidence, fortune brought this up as I opened a terminal window:
No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied occurrence
identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an indication-applied occurrence
identifies an indication-defining occurrence different from the one identified by the
given indication as an indication-applied occurrence.
-- ALGOL 68 Report Yikes…
But that bit I dont! ;-(
Mike
We we taught Algol 68 R, running it on an ICL 1904S from 1st year onwards. The 1904 was a
24bit 6 bits per “byte” system. Handling upper and lower on the line printer was a lot of
work!
The mixture of language practical and theory helped cement both. Unix did not come along
- for the uni - until a year or so later.
A decent understanding of the Algol68 pointers, deref (auto or not), casts, array slices,
garbage collection etc made moving to C fairly easy for most of the cohort.
The fortune cooked has been a bad journalist and taken the sentence out of context. The
previous 423 pages were essential reading.