Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

On 29/09/2024 05:26, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2024-09-28, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
 

On 28/09/2024 22:20, John Levine wrote:
>

C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than
any of the plausible alternatives at the time.
>

As far as I was concerned it was heaven. Assembler but 10x faster to
actually write.
And the way it used local variables was magic. Very hard to use the
stack as a scractc pad in assembler - you have to keep track of so many
offsets

 That's assuming your machine has a stack, which the IBM 360 didn't.
 

Well there are probably other ways to implement a stack than having it built into a computer.
Like a having a general purpose register reserved for a stack pointer and manually creating push pop call and return as macros
I don't see how you can run any code that needs to do subroutines without some form of stack.
--
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
Jonathan Swift.