Python

[Bengt Richter]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002 12:39:24 -0800, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>Bengt Richter fed this fish to the penguins on Monday 30 December 2002 
>09:22 am:
>
>> Which makes me wonder how much CPU designers think about supporting
>> safer programming in general, when they don't have, e.g., deep
>
>        Well... did the iAPX 432 ever really get used in any systems? This was 
>the chip that was supposed to support, in hardware, a form of of 
>object-oriented programming compatible with Ada (milstd 1815). The main 
>language was to be Ada with a few small extensions for direct hardware 
>structures.
I remember when that was news ;-)
I don't think it got used much. It was several times slower than
the 286, and was tied to Ada which got widely ignored, even though
if you had been programming in Pascal, Ada would make you think you
died and went to heaven. It had/has a number of nice features.

But in any case, the people who might benefit from safe software
(assuming the 432 would significantly facilitate its production)
were not making a market. Consumers have to wait until someone
notices that there might be money to be made catering to them
in some way. I was tangentially noticing the passivity of the
consumer's role in serving their own needs. There is no mechanism
to take an initiative in a positive direction, just class actions
to complain of damage, it seems.

So DoD/Ada by itself wasn't enough, and there are apparently
easier ways to make money than investing in that kind of development.
Also I wonder what patents intel got to foreclose on others' carrying
on with the ideas.

>
>        See: "A Programmer's View of the Intel 432 System"; Elliott I. 
>Organick (1983, McGraw-Hill)
Thanks for the reference. I'll have a look next time I'm in an
appropriate library.

Regards,
Bengt Richter