Infocom on PDP-11

[woodelf]

Andy Holt wrote:

>> Tom> The Whetsone Algol compiler ran, in one pass, as fast as the
>> Tom> source-input reader hardware, in 7000 words of memory! Though
>> Tom> slow, it's a full-featured language, unlike C which is basically
>> Tom> a portable assembler (I loved writing in C).
>>    
>>
But remember too you really had only two sized variables, ints and 
floating point.
I think the big problem with algol you never were ment to compile it, 
just write
programns in it. 8K words are ample for a language that does not have 
character
data. 32KB seems to be the smallest size a character orientated language 
like C or Pascal.
Also most machines had built in floating point so the run time size was 
small

>>I don't know how big the first Algol 60 compiler (at MC Amsterdam) was
>>-- probably similar, quite possibly smaller.
>>
>> Tom> Algol had it's share of horrors, but man it is the basis for
>> Tom> nearly all modern languages. C's block and scope structure came
>> Tom> directly from Algol.
>>
>>Lobotomized, of course -- C left out a bunch of important parts from
>>the Algol block structure.
>>    
>>
>Some because C is really from the Fortran tradition (Dirty tricks are
>sometimes useful and too strong typing and structure prevent such); some
>because they had been discovered to be more problematic than helpful.
>Algol 60 -> CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C (importing much from PL/I* ... which
>  was a union of concepts from Algol 60, Fortran IV, and COBOL using
>  Algol structure)
>* this linkage is not normally recognised in histories of programming
>languages, but when it is considered that the originators of C had been
>involved in the Multics project ... an OS written in PL/I; the only
>previous production OS that had been written in a HLL was that of the
>Burroughs machines ... using a version of Algol (to complete the
>circularity of these references).
>
>  
>
The PDP-7 with 8K of memory had a major impact on what B had for features.
Only with >8K of memory on the PDP-11 could you get a  real compiler.

>>Hm.  Algol 60 certainly has no OO nature.  Algol 68 does, the
>>beginnings of it.
>>    
>>
>
>Simula 67 was a derivative of Algol 60 that is normally recognised as the
>foundation of OO.
>
>Andy
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