> On Jan 17, 2025, at 12:10 PM, ben via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On 2025-01-17 8:46 a.m., Paul Koning wrote:
>
>> As for ALGOL, I know that Burroughs ALGOL (which is an extended ALGOL-60)
>> has separate compilation, through a linker called "Binder". There is even a
>> Binder for PDP-11 ALGOL, though I haven't tried it. PDP-11 ALGOL looks very
>> much like a 16-bit derivative of Burroughs ALGOL.
> Gadzooks, A PDP running something other than B ^H C. :)
Other than Unix, C wasn't a common PDP-11 language. Mine run BASIC-PLUS,
Macro-11, TECO, FORTH, and ALGOL.
>> paul
> Did Burroughs ALGOL, make cleaner software for people that used it?
> What about FORTRAN users? (I keep wanting to spell FORTAN)
> Ben.
What do you mean by "cleaner software"?
ALGOL was the primary language on Burroughs mainframes, and the machine
architecture was specificaly optimized for ALGOL. I don't know about FORTRAN
(or COBOL) on those machines, I expect it existed but I never ran into it.
Burroughs used ALGOL variants for various specialized purposes on those
systems. For the terminal I/O machinery there was DCALGOL (data comm Algol)
and for the kernel there was ESPOL -- basically ALGOL with C-like extensions to
allow playing with lower level machine details. Apparently there was no
assembler; a document I saw says that the only low level code is in the startup
of the kernel, written in machine language (straight hex), just enough to set
up the stack and a few other registers and transfer control to the ESPOL code
entry point.
Interestingly enough, the system security depended in large part on the fact
that there was no assembler and access to ESPOL was restricted by file system
access rules. If you could write ESPOL programs you could do things that break
security, but the regular ALGOL compiler would not generate such code. This
explains why at the shop where I used that machine (TU Eindhoven, B 6700
system) I got some very suspicious looks from the staff when I asked about
wanting to read an ESPOL manual.
paul
