Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:43:06 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>

Assembler can be fun.
 

Especially PDP-10 assembler. Wonderful instruction set.

In those days, machine instruction sets were designed for humans to
program in. Machine families like the PDP-10 and PDP-11 were highly
regarded for being refreshingly free of seemingly arbitrary and capricious
restrictions that tended to plague prior designs just to make the hardware
easier to implement.

The acme of this trend was, of course, the DEC VAX. And also a
microprocessor design that tried to copy that richness of instruction set,
the 32x00 family from Western Electric.

Unfortunately some spoilsports discovered that such complex instruction
sets were suboptimal when it came to actual performance. And furthermore
that well-designed compilers could routinely generate better code than any
mere human assembly-language programmer.

And so the good times ended ...














... doesn’t mean we can’t still play, though ...