Andreas Saurwein wrote:
Crispin Cowan wrote:
However, where ever C made an arbitrary decision (either way is just as good) PL/M went the opposite direction from C, making it very annoying for a C programmer to use.
Does that mean it did not make any decision at all? What was the outcome?
No, just trivial decisions on syntax. It made my fingers hurt to use it, because I had to retrain a lot of habits. Unfortunately I no longer remember the specifics.
When you've been around for a while, you start to see the same features
converge.. UNIX had quotas, we got Quotas with Win XP Server (well earlier,
when you include the third party ISVs - as an add on). IBM had Language
Environment (LE) before .NET come along.
Crispin Cowan wrote:
I think .Net borrows most heavily from Java. Java in turn borrows from everyone. The "managed code" thing in particular leads back to the Pascal P-code interpreter; a kludge to make the Pascal compiler easier to implement and port. The innovation in Java was to take this ugly kludge and market it as a feature :)
Michael S Hines wrote:
I'm not sure that it can be blamed on Pascal. Microsoft was shipping Excel for the Mac in the early 80's as P-Code application and has been selling P-Code generating compilers since about the same time. Ever since, MS was strong on P-Code generating compilers.
The UCSD Pascal P-Code system was released in 1978 <http://www.informationheadquarters.com/History_of_computing/UCSD_p-System.shtml>. MS Excel was released in 1984 <http://www.dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html>. And if anything, the above claim that MS has been using P-code since the early days of Excel only supports the claim that Pascal P-Code is the origin of the idea at Microsoft.
Crispin
-- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com
