[TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au]

C wasn’t the first standardised coding language, FORTRAN & COBOL at least were before it,
so there were multi-platform source libraries and shared source, though often single platform.

From what I know, vendor extensions of FORTAN, optimised for their hardware, were common,
making high-performance, portable source difficult or impossible. 6-bit and 8-bit chars were the least of it.

Is this right:

	C was the first ’systems tool’ language + libraries available across many platforms.
	Notionally, source code could be ported with zero or minimal change.
	It made possible portable languages like PERL, PHP, Python.

	[ then came the "Tower of Babel" requiring tools like ‘autoconf’ ]

C became a bootstrapping environment for other portable languages & tools, e.g. C++ & Golang.

Secondly, portable systems tool languages with a common 2-part design
of parser/front-end providing an abstract syntax tree 
to multiple back-ends with platform specific code-generators.

Are these back-ends where most of the assembler, memory model and instruction optimisation take place now?


> On 6 Jul 2024, at 09:17, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> 
> Back in the day getting a program to act the same on different
> computers, was really hard, with the switch from IBM 7090 (36 bit word
> addressed binary floating point) to IBM 360 (32 or 64 bit byte
> addressed hex floating point) the most famous example. These days we
> write code and compile it for x64 or ARM or RISC-V and for the most
> part, it just works because the data formats and addressing are all
> the same.


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Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
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