AT&T has a YouTube channel, where a few times a week they post old videos from the glory days. A few years ago, they posted a cool video from 1982 called The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive. It’s worth a watch. There’s lots of other gems on the channel. For example, how about an interview with Arthur C Clarke from 1976?
Imagine a world where code is truly portable!
Edited 2017-03-29 23:42 UTC
Assemblers aren’t in the first place, so…
Academics want something clean and elegant, people on the field want something that works… most of the time. So we got UNIX, C and the IBM PC.
Lisp machines, missed opportunities…
You mean the world of Fortran, Lisp, Algol 68, Lisp, PL/I?
Contrary to urban legends there was a computing world outside AT&T walls.
Cue the obligatory Blazing Saddles clip:
“You said Lisp twice.”
“I like Lisp.”
“Read my Lisp!”
Even within AT&T, there was a world which is now mostly forgotten. For example, something called “A Little Implementation Language” (LIL):
http://www.ultimate.com/phil/lil/lil.html
“A language is described that was implemented on a PDP-11 computer for writing system-level code for the PDP-11 family of minicomputers. The Little Implementation Language LIL offers a number of features that facilitate writing structured, high-level code with no sacrifice in efficiency over assembly language. The discussion ends with a harsh evaluation of its future usefulness.”
Thanks for linking to that – very interesting. It actually does seem useful to me, despite the negative assessment at the end.
It sits about halfway between Assembler and C. It uses a C-like syntax, which is much easier to work with than opcodes, but uses registers and memory access instead of arbitrary variables, and allows access to condition codes (which is a shortcoming of every portable, high-level language).
If I had to write extremely low-level, machine-dependent code, I would certainly prefer to do it in a language like this rather than Assembly!
Is anyone aware of any other efforts in this direction? (I admit that I am not an expert in esoteric/obscure languages.)
I haven’t read the full article yet, but he mentions Wirth’s PL/360. He also mentions nested control structures, which makes me think of MASM v6 syntax.
Okay, so that was a short article. I agree that a standard, portable language is better overall than low-level stuff. (I like Wirth languages although I’m unfamiliar with PL/360.) But personally I’m tired of the bloat. (Wirth’s _Plea for Lean Software_, anyone?) Well, there are many workarounds, so it could always be worse.
“Other efforts in this direction”? Probably Forth. And Sphinx C–. And maybe even Turbo Pascal (since it had “absolute”, Port[], Mem[] even before it had inline asm). Even Modula-2 and Oberon have pseudo-module SYSTEM for low-level stuff like this.
the best part of this video is that they don’t treat the viewer as idiots…..Second runner up is the 80’s ness of it 🙂
If you 80s things, try this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE