On 08/11/2015 07:52 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
Yes, that was a pretty nice system. Certainly not the first ALGOL system, but a decent one even though they did put a bunch of Fortran-like ugliness into the I/O.
As I recall, the I/O in the Algol-60 report was not particularly well-defined. Pascal followed this pattern also.
So Burroughs could hardly be blamed.
PDP11 DECUS ALGOL was clearly inspired by that, it’s a subset of Burroughs ALGOL and the generated code looks like a 16-bit variant of B5500 machine code.
I hadn't realized that descriptors had been implemented on the PDP-11.
Note though that some of the discussion was about Algol 68, which is a rather different language. I don’t know that Burroughs ever did anything with it, but some other companies did (CDC for one).
I don't know where Algol 68 in the CDC world came from; I am aware of no one in CPD Sunnyvale who worked on it. Was it a VIM contribution?
“native” in what sense? There are plenty of machines, from many companies, that support block structured languages well. The PDP11 and VAX are among those, as are the Burroughs mainframes, the Electrologica EL-X8, and many others. If so, they will do well at Algol, Pascal, C, Modula, Ada, and so on.
Well, CDC 6600 routinely beat out IBM's iron on COBOL, even without character addressability or the capability for decimal arithmetic.
If you mean “native” in the sense of an instruction set tailored for running Algol programs, no — in that sense, Burroughs was rather unusual, though you might point at the Electrologica EL-X8 as another example.
That's exactly what I mean. --Chuck
