John Backus passes away...

[jd]

Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On 3/21/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>> On 22 Mar 2007 at 0:17, Tony Duell wrote:
>> > ... And for that matter the Commodore PET (I know
>> > the SuperPET had such a compiler), the C64, etc.
>>
>> How many of the above would run *any* type of compile-to-machine-
>> language HLL compiler?  Most of the BASICs were tokenized and
>> interpreted.
> 
> There was a C compiler for the C-64.  It was terrible and slow, but it
> did do small programs.  There were also BASIC compilers, but they
> weren't terribly fashionable.  Mostly folks programmed in interpreted
> BASIC or assembler on those platforms (though there _was_ a push for a
> while for a language named COMAL, but I avoided it).
> 

I used one of those compilers. What a piece of cr at p.

It compiled at run time only, like Alice Pascal, and was terribly slow. The
copy protected/write protected compiler disk had to be in the drive while the
program was running. I don't recall it being possible to save programs to
another disk.

It took five minutes to compile "hello world"

It could only be useful to learn something about C.

Assembler was more fun. Especially when playing with self-modifying code.

--
jd
Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent.
                 -- Walt Kelly