[cctalk] Re: "It's dead, Jim" Was: Re: Intel 3086

[Paul Koning via cctalk]

> On Jun 16, 2026, at 8:55 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
>> And COBOL...  Don't forget COBOL....   :-)
> 
> That's the best example.
> There is also FORTRAN
> Fortran
> APL
> ADA
> Pascal
> RPG
> BASIC
> Assembly language  (35? years ago, UC Berkeley's revised curricula for CS, 
> Clancy and Harvey said, "Nobody prograns in assembly language any more, nor 
> ever will again")

COBOL was recently added to the GCC compiler suite (as was Modula-2 and Algol 
68).  And gfortran sees lots and lots of development; it seems that various 
fields use it extensively still.  Weather forecasting seems to be one example.

And ADA has been and remains an active part of GCC, too.  Not to mention that 
it's the foundation of VHDL (and the open source GHDL simulator is written in 
Ada).

As for assembly language, that certainly is still alive.  A FORTH package I use 
extensively on the Raspberry Pico is written mostly in Forth, but the rest in 
assembler -- no C to be found anywhere at all.  For that matter, you can't 
program the Pico's programmable state machine engines in anything other than 
assembler, for the simple reason that nothing else will serve when you only 
have 32 words of program memory.

        paul