Re: [TUHS] Unix stories, Stephen Bourne and IF-FI in C code

On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 08:30:58am -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote: Surrey University, 1986-1990; reading EE, we had a set of programming lectures where we were required to learn it (to some extent) as we had to submit course work written in it. I tended to do the work in C on the dept Gould running unix, then transliterate to Algol 68 for the final submission. This was because the compiler was only available as a batch submission process, and we'd have long turn arounds just to get past syntax checks. Especially when 100 of us were trying to submit jobs at the same time. I still recall the frustration of a few hours turn around just to get an error about 'semi-colon not required here', which would then complain 'semi-colon required once one removed it'. I actually quite liked it, just it was a bit verbose, and I never figured out how to do pointers or dynamic allocation in it at the time, so some conversions ended up being less than optimal. As I recall one could convert the ternary op to an IF expression, and the loop construct combined all of 'while' 'for' and 'do while' depending upon which syntax elements one used. DF