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

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Sat, Jul 6, 2024 at 8:52 AM <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:

> Is this right:
>
>         C was the first ’systems tool’ language + libraries available
> across many platforms.
>
No !! Not even close.

ESPOL predators all of them, although one can say since it was only
available on Burroughs large, medium, and small systems - it was retargeted,
but not widely used.

Other systems programming languages followed, BCPL, BLISS, PL/360 and even
B before C. If you consider PL/M a child of PL/360 (which is was more than
child of PL/1 if you look at it), all of the others have code generators
and libraries for multiple ISA and OS and did before C did. That said, I
don't think any fo them have as many targets as C and many FORTRAN.

I might accept this rephrasing:

*While other systems' programming languages existed, and many were
retargets to multiple ISA/OS combinations, because of its appearance as a
language with a licensed but open implementation, at the time of the first
widespread available of inexpensive microprocessors, the language and it
libraries became (and continues to remain) the widest and most popular
systems development language in production use.*

WRT: FORTRAN.  John is correct; Kahan and his students demonstrated the
core problem with Paranoia ( https://www.netlib.org/paranoia/ ). But
remember that the FP issue was more than just a FORTRAN problem [BTW: I
took that class in those days].  You are correct that private extensions
were also a problem, although through F4 - the 'standard was IBM's 'G'
compiler, and while most vendors ensured they could pass the ANSI test
suite, smart vendors made sure they were IBM FORTRAN-G compliant. A good
example is the original Adventure game written on DEC's PDP-10 FORTRAN
compiler in the late 1970s, but it seemed to be running on anything a
FORTRAN compiler within weeks of its release on the ARPAnet [I know that my
peeps and I fed it to FORTRAN-G on TSS].

The same issue of "ANSI Standard" vs "De Facto Standard" occurred with F77,
but the de facto standard was VMS FORTRAN by that time    That said, by
F90, which is also post IEEE 754 [FP format] - portable FORTRAN code in the
wild was really not the issue it had been in the 60s and 70s.  FWIW: With
FORTRAN 2018, the compiler most people reference and for code that runs on
most supers is Intel's (DEC derived) ifort - but even Intel is replacing
that with their investment in IFX, the LLVM-based backend using Intel
rewritten (and FOSS) LLVM FORTRAN front end.

Clem

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