> On Aug 12, 2015, at 1:39 PM, Nigel Williams <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>
>> On 12 Aug 2015, at 11:24 pm, Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote:
>> ...
>> Did Algol come after the hardware? I always thought of the hardware as
>> having been customized for their Algol, but admittedly I don’t actually know
>> which is chicken and which is egg.
>
> It is suggested in the oral history at UMN.edu that the B5000 was designed as
> an ALGOL machine and Burroughs had the idea that only compilers would
> generate machine code, so they made the B5000 compiler friendly, and the
> system would have an OS to manage resources, so it was designed around
> drum/disk being an intrinsic part of the system.
That sounds right. For one thing, it is clear if you study the hardware
manuals that the system is NOT secure against machine language programmers.
Security comes from the fact that the compilers other than ESPOL will not
generate code that compromises security, and the ESPOL compiler is protected so
that ordinary peons do not have access to it.
I found this out when I tried to write a program that reads foreign format
tapes, in particular past tape marks. Algol can’t do that — either that, or
the consultants couldn’t figure out how. I started looking at other languages,
but when I started asking questions about DCALGOL I got a whole lot of pushback
from the system staff. They viewed questions like that with extreme suspicion.
paul
