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From: boebert@sctc.com (Earl Boebert)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Algol was an advance, was He's not the only one at it again!
Message-ID: <1990Jul31.231428.4741@sctc.com>
Date: 31 Jul 90 23:14:28 GMT
References: <1288@s8.Morgan.COM> <58372@lanl.gov> <1990Jul30.174035.26412@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> <3262@stl.stc.co.uk> <1990Jul31.185100.2865@sctc.com>
Organization: Secure Computing Technology Corporation
Lines: 37

boebert@sctc.com (Earl Boebert) writes:

>tom@stl.stc.co.uk (Tom Thomson) writes:

>>In article <1990Jul30.174035.26412@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
>>>(Of course, just because Algol has a context-free easy-to-tokenize syntax
>>>doesn't mean that actual implementations all do.  There was IBM's Algol F,
>>>which ignored blanks and required you to put quotes around your keywords,
>>>proving once again that Real programmers can write Fortran programs in any
>>>language.

>>What's been forgotten here is that ALL the early implementations of Algol
>>had this problem, it's NOT an IBM Algol F problem.
>>
> 
>[Stuff deleted ...]

>>Tom Thomson   [tom @ nw.stl.stc.co.uk

>I don't recall GEIR Algol as having special delimeters for reserved words;
>will check my old class notes from Naur's course to be sure and report
>later ...

>Earl

Well I misremembered, including the spelling of the machine's name ...
GIER Algol *underlined* reserved words, an elegance made possible
because I/O on the machine was through a Flexowriter. This also gave
them upper and lower case; we 026-limited Yankees were pretty envious
of that!  For the historically minded, the project was started in
January of 1962 and a running compiler was available in February of
1963. GIER was a Danish machine: 1024 42-bit words of core w/8.8
microseconds access and 12,800 words on drum with 20 milliseconds to
transfer a 40-word track; rather a speedly little devil for its time.
The compiler was, to say the least, a beautiful piece of work, and all
us budding compiler-writers went out of our way to sit at Naur's feet
and hear how he did it.