[email protected] (John Gilmore) writes: > What I think of Pascal and our disagreement are not themselves > important; but such differences strongly suggest that discussions of > the relative merits of different statement-level procedural languages > is an all but futile undertaking unless the context in which they are > to take place is specified in advance and in great, irksome detail.
the IBM mainframe pascal was originally done by the IBM Los Gatos VLSI tools group. They had been doing a lot of language work with Metaware's TWS ... TWS reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#71 What terminology reflects the "first" computer language ? other past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#35 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#6 About TLB in lower-level caches http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#12 About TLB in lower-level caches http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#58 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#77 CLIs and GUIs http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#36 Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#11 Microprocessors with Definable MIcrocode http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#54 PL/I vs. Pascal It was used for a lot of VLSI tools before being released as product to customers. It was then also used implementing the ibm mainframe tcp/ip support ... I've periodically commented that it had none of the buffer overrun and other exploits that have been epidemic in C-language based implementations. some past posts about C-language vulnerabilities and exploits http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow there was other throughput issues with the mainframe tcp/ip (got 44kbytes/sec using 3090 processor) ... but I did the changes for rfc1044 support and in some tuning tests at cray research got sustained channel speed between 4341 and cray ... using only modest amount of 4341 processor (possibly 500 times improvement in bytes moved per instruction executed). misc. past post mentioning 1044 support http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044 for the fun of it I did a rewrite in pascal of a major portion of the VM370 kernel (done in assembler) ... and demonstrated it running (faster) in virtual address space interacting with a smaller vm370 kernel. part of the issue was that mainframe PLI came with really heavyweight library environment ... while Pascal could run in effectively as an independent "embedded" environment. Note that this wasn't directly a fault of PLI language ... since MIT Project MAC used PLI language to implement the Multics operating system. http://www.multicians.org/multics.html the mainframe product pascal was ported to the rs/6000 ... and typically same pascal programs that ran on mainframe ran also on rs/6000. after IBM went into the red in the early 90s, IBM was cutting back all over the place ... it transitioned to using a lot more off-the-shelf industry VLSI design tools ... transition included transfering a lot of internal tools to outside vendors. As part of one transfer, I got tasked to port one 50,000+ statement vs/pascal VLSI layout program to other vendor platforms. This was somewhat tramatic since 1) pascals on these platforms appeared like they had never been used for much more than univ. student instruction and 2) in one major case, the pascal support had been outsourced to an organization 12 time zones away (I could drop in the computer vendor hdqtrs location ... but still had to wait for minimum 1 day turn around). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
