David Boyes said:
On 11/15/08 8:28 PM, "Jeff Savit" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A similar machine was the Lilith, created at
> ETH Zurich, and oriented around Modula-2. I never saw one personally,
> but I recall reading that it had a very stylish teak wood cabinet!
Very heavy, as well. Takes two *strong* people to move one. Takes a serious
cart to move one very far.
So, be certain of its placement when you put it in the attractive,
modern livingroom of the future!
> Anyhow, language based processors seem to be a seductive design pattern
> that hasn't really gained momentum for general purpose computing.
Don't forget the Xerox D-machines and the Symbolics, and the LMI machines as
well. Symbolics still has a lot of applications in DOD space, and there are
still hundreds of D-machines and D-machine descendants in the space program.
I didn't know the Dorado and Dolphin had p-code like instruction sets;
I thought they were conventional instruction set architectures along the
lines of a Nova.. I would be amazed if D-* were still in use after 30+
years. The real innovation there was in the WYSIWYG graphical view it
provided - a breathtaking leap forward.
> Anyone else want to 'fess up to having worked with UCSD Pascal or Modula-2?
Many, many hours with both. And p-System FORTRAN, and the p-Writing Tools
package developed at UCSD, which was a brilliant set of writing assistant
gadgets for teaching technical writing, and an ancestor of Google Apps by
marriage. Modula, less time, but contributed a fair amount of doc kvetching
to the CMS Modula port.
You must mean the _other_ Modula-2 port to CMS, not mine. I had Dick
Karpinski to harass me :-) after I presented it at MODUS and USUS. Ah,
memories! If anyone wants my compiler and runtime system I'm sure I can
dig it up. I added libraries to access CP and CMS functions for systems
programming; I even did a VMCF interface. But REXX made that use-case
superfluous.
P-System was more than just the languages -- the whole environment was
pretty slick. It had a very decent editor and (if you liked Lotus 123), a
fairly intuitive interface. It'd be a great start for a very lightweight
Java OS that actually could be useful.
-- db
p-System was definitely a nice system for the time.
--
Jeff Savit
Principal Field Technologist
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: 732-537-3451 (x63451)
400 Atrium Drive Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Somerset, NJ 08873 http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/
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