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From: herndon@umn-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Re: Using C as an aid to hand writin
Message-ID: <17200004@umn-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-May-86 17:18:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: umn-cs.17200004
Posted: Thu May 15 17:18:00 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 20-May-86 05:57:28 EDT
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Nf-ID: #R:gitpyr:-176300:umn-cs:17200004:000:785
Nf-From: umn-cs!herndon    May 15 16:18:00 1986


  I believe the military did some research to find architectures
which optimized programmer performance for assembly languages.
I don't know of any references, but someone from Johns Hopkins
applied physics lab once made the claim that the PDP-11 and the
ANYUK-20 (?sp) were far and away the best machines for helping
programmers produce working code quickly.
  Interpreters for machines are also quite old; back before
any machines had floating point hardware, it was not an uncommon
practice to program in pseudo-ops which were then interpreted.
These pseudo-ops often looked much like P-codes.  This is mentioned
in some of the introductory textbooks on computer languages.
  Anybody else hear about anything like either of these?

					Robert Herndon
					...!ihnp4!umn-cs!herndon