Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 2/25/2025 3:36 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

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 ...

<snip>

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

 Branch delay slots took whatever fun there was out of RISC assembly language. The DEC Alpha didn't have them, but a few other architectures did.
 (I just looked up "delay slot" -- just because it's been so long since I used the term in a sentence -- and I found a five-year-old Stack Overflow discussion about delay slots being out of fashion. I had no idea.)