> On May 9, 2024, at 6:43 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> ...
> I've written code in Pascal, as well as Modula-2. Never liked
> it--seemed to be a bit awkward for the low-level stuff that I was doing.
Not surprising, since that's not what it is all about. Both, like their
predecessor ALGOL-60 as well as successors like Ada, are strongly typed
languages where doing unsafe stuff is made very hard. Contrast that with C,
which sets out to make it easy to do unsafe things and partly for that reason
has a feeble type system. So doing low level stuff like device drivers is
difficult, unless you create extensions to break out of the type system. An
example of how to do that is the Burroughs extension of ALGOL called ESPOL,
which is what they used to write the OS. Actually, Burroughs did a number of
extended versions for different purposes; there's also DCALGOL (Data comm
ALGOL) intended for writing communications software. Why that's separate from
ESPOL I don't really know; I only ever got to do regular ALGOL programming on
Burroughs mainframes. One reason for that: those systems depend on the
compilers for their security; if ordinary users got access to ESPOL they could
write dangerous code, but in ALGOL they cannot.
paul
