Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

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

According to The Natural Philosopher  <tnp@invalid.invalid>:

The need to speed up BASIC was why I learnt Assembler...

 Dartmouth BASIC on the GE 635 compiled your program into machine code
and then ran it, so it was pretty snappy.  The compiler was so fast that
it wasn't worth keeping the objsct code around.  They didn't have a linker
until they added a PL/I compiler that was as slow as PL/I compilers are.
 All this running 100 users on a machine the size of the KA-10 PDP-10.
 

Then I moved onto C, and that was the best of both worlds really

 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
I started out on BDS C which had sever limitations, not the least was promoting everything 8 bit to 16 bit to do comparisons etc.
And simply 'compiler confused - giving up' on many more advanced declarations.
But I wrote quite a bit in that.
Then I moved on to PCS and C on an IBM PC was way faster.
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