[email protected] (John McKown) writes:
> Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of
> everything and the Wirth of nothing?

two people from the Los Gatos VLSI lab originally did mainframe pascal
for VLSI chip tools ... this goes on eventually to become the vs/pascal
product. Amoung other things it was used to implement the original
mainframe TCP/IP support. It originally had some performance issues ... getting
around 44kbytes/sec throughput using 3090 processor. However, I did the
RFC1044 changes and in some tuning tests at Cray Research got sustained
channel media throughput between Cray and 4341 using only modest amount
of the 4341 processor (possibly 500 times improvement in bytes moved per
instruction executed). past posts mentioning doing rfc 1044 support
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044

One of the issues is the (pascal) implementation had none of the
exploits that have been epidemic in c-language implementions
... observation it is about as hard for a programmer to *NOT* have such
exploits in c-language as it is for a pascal programmer to have such
problems. past posts mentioning c-language exploits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#buffer

in the period that IBM had gone into the red and was re-organized into
the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company (until
the board brought in Gerstner who reversed the breakup and resurrect the
company) ... there was big move for business operations to get off of
proprietary tools & platforms.  Part of this was to transfer proprietary
tools to standard industry tool vendors and get them running on industry
standar platforms. I had to do one such pascal 50,000+ lines of code
vlsi application. Problem was that pascal on some of these other
platforms appeared to have been used for little else than introduction
to programming classes (one such platform was in the local area, but
they had outsourced their pascal support to someplace 12 time zones
away, located near a space launch center).

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

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