Language change and code breaks

[Grant Edwards]

In article <cplmlb5q2t.fsf at cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com>, Guido van Rossum wrote:

>> 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.

And (at least in the Pascal compiler) identifiers were limited
to 6 characters so that an entire identifier would fit into a
single word -- so two identifiers could be compared in a single
instruction.

>> (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...

Yikes.  It was an interesting architecture.  One of my
assignments in a class once upon a time was to write a 6600
instruction set simulator in 6600 assembly language.  It had a
small, regular instruction set and it was surprisingly easy...

Doing the same thing for a Pentium would be pretty horrific.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  SHHHH!! I hear SIX
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