Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Fri, 7 Mar 2025 18:52:43 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:

[Fortran] was high enough, right from the start, to abstract away a
_lot_ of the machine, while still being quite efficient.

John Backus described the techno-cultural milieu in which Fortran was
born, in one of a collection of papers on the origins of historically-
significant programming languages, that I read many decades ago.

It was one of the first, if not the first, serious attempt at an
optimizing compiler. He mentions the surprise people felt (including, of
course, seasoned assembly-language programmers) at how far the generated
code departed from a simple correspondence to the individual statements of
the original source.

As I recall, much of the competition at the time took the form of
floating-point calculation engines with interpreted languages on top.