Language change and code breaks

[Guido van Rossum]

Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu> writes:

> Or worse the lack of a full ASCII character set on the host computer.
> My first programs were on a CDC Cyber mainframe with a 60 bit word;
> we had several character sets at our disposal, but nearly all programming
> was done in 6 bit "display code", no lower case.  (The only exception
> was a C compiler, which - no offense to the Texas university where it
> was created, certainly it was a noble effort - wasn't very useful.)
> That would be laughable today, but the computer world was a lot more
> diverse at that level then, and we inherit a lot from those days.

Including Python -- my interest in programming and languages was
sparked by the plethora of languages on the CDC Cyber that was my
first comuter back in 1974, and remained my primary system until
1982...

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)