Infocom on PDP-11

[Bjørn Vermo]

On Wed, 11 May 2005 15:42:36 +0200, Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net>  
wrote:

>>
>> Subject: Re: Infocom on PDP-11
>>   From: Tom Jennings <tomj at wps.com>
>>   Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 22:10:08 -0700 (PDT)
>>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only"  
>> <cctech at classiccmp.org>
>
>> As far as sophistication goes -- a better measure than simply how
>> clever or nifty a thing is -- how far did it advance the state of
>> the art?  Good Algol's in the early 1960's look like stuff robbed
>> from the far-flung future. A lot of the "compilers" from that era
>> we'd today call p-code interpreters (terminology changes) but man,
>> Algol60 is neat stuff. (Not the bloated monster Algol68 (I think
>> it was) became.
>
> Having programmed in algol on the PDP-8 back when it was a real
> eye opener for a new basic programmer.  The PDP-8 Timeshare didn't
> know strings.
>
We never used goto in the way we saw in FORTRAN and COBOL programs, Algol  
60 was a nicely block-structured language.
I did not see any problems with lack of strings, either. We used integer  
arrays for the little text manipulation we needed.
The big stumbling block was the lack of proper input and output, and Knuth  
found a workable solution for that.
Of course, on a CDC-3300 running MASTER the resources were ample for even  
really complex programs.

-- 
Bjørn