Re: VMS

On 6/21/25 2:57 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 10:12:28 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

Although they didn't *invent* stack based temporary variables I was
totally impressed when I discovered how they worked.

 ALGOL 60 had that worked out years earlier. The implementors even figured
out how to declare one routine inside another, such that the inner one
could access the outer one’s locals.
 C never had that, even to this day†. Even after Pascal showed how to
implement the same idea.
 †Not officially. But GNU C does. (Oddly, GNU C++ does not.)

   Bright minds everywhere, even WAY back (ESPECIALLY
   way back ?).
   Early ALGOL wasn't really intended to be a practical
   language alas ... more a 'demonstration of principle'.
   Algol-68 ... which you CAN get for Linux ... was much
   better.
   Ok ok ... 'better' is relative here  :-)
   In early CPUs there was often limited EZ stack space.
   This was a limitation in passing lots of stuff back
   and forth using the stack. A few pointers yes, but
   like full strings and arrays ..........
   Seems like some of the most clever stuff comes from
   environments were resources are very limited/slow.