Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

On 29/09/2024 21:15, Peter Flass wrote:

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> 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.
>

 C was/is great for the low-level systems stuff, but then it started getting
used for everything, and getting stuf added to greatly complexity it.
 

Well yes. But you get around that by writing powerful well documented C libraries, so that complex operations become a simple function call.
--
"Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it."
    - Stephen Vizinczey