From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16269 invoked by alias); 5 Jan 2003 12:44:21 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 16259 invoked from network); 5 Jan 2003 12:44:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO nile.gnat.com) (205.232.38.5) by 209.249.29.67 with SMTP; 5 Jan 2003 12:44:19 -0000 Received: by nile.gnat.com (Postfix, from userid 338) id 2C2F5F2D5D; Sun, 5 Jan 2003 07:44:08 -0500 (EST) To: aph@redhat.com, dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: c++ "with" keyword Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Message-Id: <20030105124408.2C2F5F2D5D@nile.gnat.com> Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2003 12:56:00 -0000 From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) X-SW-Source: 2003-01/txt/msg00206.txt.bz2 > Believe that if you wish. I'm not a betting man. The Algol 68 > language had no implementations when it was standardized -- AFAIK the > first delivery was 1977! That's serious misinformation. Algol-68R, which was widely used in universities industry and defence applications first appeared in 1970 (I was at Leeds in the summer of 1971 and used the compiler extensively at that time, it was in excellent shape). Algol-68R was a very large subset, with only a few restrictions (it was much closer to full Algol-68 than any "C++" compiler was to the first C++ standard when it appeared). (Good thing you did not take on the bet, sounds like you have never programmed in Algol-68 :-) The first complete full language implementation for the CDC was delivered in 1974 only a couple of years after the revised report. 1976 saw the appearence of Algol-68S, the widely used subset on the PDP-11 (that's the subset I had my students write self-bootstrapping compilers on Knuth's new MIX machine, we ended up with about 10 fully bootstrapped compilers from a one semester course -- so it's not *that* hard to implement) In fact, A68 is a much easier language to implement than C++ or Ada or F90 or Java I would say. Once again, the issue was general resources. We have seen how difficult it has been to get g++ into reasonably complete shape, and that's with far more investment of volunteer and paid effort than went into any Algol-68 compiler. And the time scale for g++ was indeed far longer than for the A68 compilers that did appear. It is indeed a pity that no nice implementation appeared on the IBM mainframes. In fact, to get back to something at least a big relevant to this mailing list, this was a place where free software principles would have made all the difference. There was in fact a VERY nice compiler for the IBM mainframes which appeared in 1978. Remember this is a full featured language with strong abstraction capabilities, full garbage collection, and built-in multi-threading capabiltiies, appearing 25 years ago. But unfortunately the authors decided to try to make money, and sold it for a very large amount of money (comparable to what IBM charged for major compilers). I think they sold precisely three copies to Canadian universities. I pleaded with them to make it more generally available, but unsuccessfully. I think if we had todays free software and open source environment, and that compiler had been distributed that way, we might have seen a very different history for Algol-68.