[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
But... tell me please, ANYONE, who takes part in this inspiring exchange: How many COBOL programs have you written in your life? How many programs in Cobol have you actually SEEN?
Shudder. In '86, I had to modify a COBOL code generator, *written in COBOL*. The generated program read some data from a database and printed out zillions of reports; the generated program took more than 24 hours to run, so rarely ever completed successfully, as the machines they ran it on was not all that reliable. So I had to modify the generator to generate 'check-pointing' code, so the reporting program could be restarted from the last checkpoint rather than from the start. Report generation was something that COBOL was rather good at; code generation was an entirely different matter! That first exposure to (untyped) code-generation probably explains why I'm such a big fan of metaocaml these days...
That year, I had way more fun figuring out how call-by-name worked in Algol 60, by starting at the generated thunks in the Burroughs 6800 assembly. Nice thing about that machine was that it was a pure stack machine - kind of like the JVM, as a matter of fact. The other nice thing about that machine is that they had completely bootstrapped it, so that there was only an Algol compiler for it, no user-level assembler at all [but a disassembler for debugging]. It had been bootstrapped several years back, or so I was told.
Jacques _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
