[HECnet] Thrashing about...

Algol68 was Betamax to Pascal and Ada?s VHS. The former was technically superior and the other two just easier to deal with?. That?s how I feel anyway. Algol68 had ?Mode? as a generalisation of type, encompassing value, reference (variables), the triple reference. A truly liberal approach to ?pointers? able to point to locations on the stack or on the heap with only the most natural restriction and garbage collection. I really enjoyed the ability in Algol68 to slice and trim multi-dimensional arrays any way I wanted? and the VAX/VMS compiler doing a pretty good job of handling the details in its generated code. Who needed call by name when you could pass routine texts (procedure/function bodies) as parameters to procedures and functions. No restrictions on ?function? results either. The RSRE compiler interfaced to VMS quite naturally ? the CALLS/CALLG convention happened automatically and there were modifiers for call by immediate value, STRUCTnCHAR modes for less liberal string handling possible in runtime libraries. I/O (transput) formats were fun but there was no parallel processing ? I didn?t really miss that anyway. The use of triple REFs?.. joyous. And yes, Algol68 RS was the result of work at RSRE in Malvern. The compiler exists in one form as a part of Ella and generates C source code. It?s not nice. I have contacted Altran who apparently adopted the software output from RSRE. Attempts to contact them have resulted in silence. I?ll continue to try from time to time. Keith From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Alex van Denzel Sent: 16 July 2018 20:05 To: hecnet at update.uu.se Subject: Re: [HECnet] Thrashing about... Op ma 16 jul. 2018 00:45 schreef Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com<mailto:clemc at ccc.com>>: On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 4:54 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net<mailto:paulkoning at comcast.net>> wrote: Algol68-RS? That's not familiar. I don't remember Algol 68 from DEC. I do remember using Algol 68 at the University of Twente, circa 1985, on a DEC2060 (TOPS10). I don't know the make or model. And on the Algol 60 note, I have a set of papertapes for ROGALGOL for a PDP-8 (and some documentation for it) -- Alex. [https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type=…