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From: shapiro@rb-dc1.UUCP (Mike Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: High- vs. low-level languages (Was: Re: Why unix doesn't catch on)
Summary: memories of times gone by
Keywords: portability, HLL, SNOBOL4, CDC 6x00
Message-ID: <521@rb-dc1.UUCP>
Date: 22 May 89 22:41:34 GMT
References: <664@tukki.jyu.fi> <360014@hplvli.HP.COM> <2971@rti.UUCP>
Reply-To: shapiro@rb-dc1.SanDiego.gould.UUCP (Michael Shapiro)
Organization: Encore, San Diego (formerly Gould, soon to be extinct)
Lines: 34

In article <2971@rti.UUCP> bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) writes:
...                                      Programming the [CDC] 6000 
>in assembler would be possible but somewhat disorienting for most 
>assembler programmers.
...

Ah, but it was fun for us doing all sorts of strange things on that
machine.  For example, at Purdue on educational leave from Bell
Telephone Labs, I did much of the first port of SNOBOL4, from the IBM
360 to the CDC 6500.  SNOBOL4 was written entirely in a "portable"
assembly language.  To implement it, I had to write many macros and
runtime routines.  (For credit, R. Stockton Gaines did some of the
initial work.)  [Reference: my chapter in Ralph Griswold's book on the
macro implementation of SNOBOL4.]

I also did "word processing" on it (before the phrase was invented)
and even printed my dissertation on an electrostatic "dot matrix"
printer, using a typesetting package I wrote on the CDC.

Regarding assembler vs HLL, I have vague memories of professor Maury
Halstead telling us in one of our classes of some early research (by
the Navy at NEL, perhaps?) that made the breakpoint between assembler
and higher level language (like Neliac or Jovial) at around 400 lines.
Above that size, programmers of assembly language couldn't keep track
of the program organization as well as a compiler and would tend to
produce strung-out code.  Does anybody have references to this type of
research?  As I recall, it was done in the early 1960s.



-- 
Michael Shapiro, Encore Computer Corporation (formerly Gould/GSD)
15378 Avenue of Science, San Diego, CA 92128
(619)485-0910    UUCP: shapiro@rb-dc1