Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote on Mon, 10 Apr 2017 20:59:40 +0000 > On 4/10/2017 4:42 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > > Were there any microprocessor chips that attempted to mimic the > > Burroughs B5000 series and natively execute Algol of any flavor? > > No, but Western Digital implemented the UCSD P-machine in hardware > selling it as the Pascal Microengine. I always wanted on of those > but I fear few have survived the scrap yard.
This shared most chips with the DEC LSI-11 but used different microcode. I created this list for one of my talks: Historical Language Specific Architectures: - Algol: English Electric KDF9, Burroughs B5000 - APL: Philip Abrams' machine - Pascal: Western Digital Microengine - Modula-2: Lilith - extended Ada: Intel iAPX432 - Lisp: Symbolics, Lisp Machine Inc., Texas Instruments, Xerox D Machines - Forth: Novix, Harris RTX-2000, MISC MC17, WISC CPU/16, SC32, MuP21, MSL16, Ignite, i21, F21, E16, MARC4, QSP16, TF2216, Steamer16, MicroCore,J1, SC20, F18 GA144 - Java: picoJava, aj102, Cjip, Komodo, FemtoJava, ARM Jazelle,JOP, SHAP, MAJIC - Smalltalk: Xerox D Machines, Katana32, Swamp, AI32, SOAR, COM, Rekursive, Mushroom, J-Machine I expect this list is not complete. Note that I don't include computers created for a specific language using a conventional processor, like the APL computers MCM/70, IBM 5100 and Ampere WS-1. Some architectures that are considered general purpose have included features to support specific languages. The original 8086 was good at running Pascal, but pretty bad at C, for examle (this was fixed in the 386). The National 32016 tried to support Modula-2 (and Ada) which forced the 68020 to add matching features, which then were dropped from the 68030 as it became obvious that C had won the language wars of the 1980s. About the original question, since the Burroughs architecture was eventually implemented as a microprocessor you can say that this was designed to run Algol: http://www.cpushack.com/2015/04/18/the-forgotten-ones-unisys-scamp-d-mai nframe/ -- Jecel
