Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:47:17 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

I never liked the -8, although to be truthful I only did a small amount
of assembler. Minimalist is good, but (IIRC) it had too many quirks for
me.

Too constraining, with the ability to only have 128 instructions/data
words before hitting the next page boundary.

I did once toy with the idea of, not quite a cross-assembler, but the use
of Python constructs to generate code
<https://bitbucket.org/ldo17/crosscode8/src/master/>. This tried to do
automatic handling of the necessary adjustments of addresses across page
boundaries; I think the algorithm works, though I never tested it very
thoroughly. ;)

I wonder why DEC’s 18-bit range weren’t more popular; though I think they
had less consistency between members of the range than DEC’s other product
families.