In "fairness" to MS, DOS only survived because of the anti-competitive tricks that Gates got up to which stifled the alternatives and lumbered us with his largely pirated s**te forever more. At the time there was a better application than everything that MS could put out there.
e:
Massachusetts Utility Medical Programming System
The London Hospital Whitechapel had a very good pharmacy system written in Mumps back in the late 70's to mid 80's. They also had a blunderbus Univac
418-II with 96 VDU terminals around the hospital and that was all written i n RTOS assembler, using punched cards !!.AFAIK MUMPS allowed a file to be regarded as an enormous table of records, with no need for the programmer to be concerned about disk handling. The Re difon Keycheck and Seecheck systems of a similar era had vaguely similar fe atures.
Lots of familiar languages but not seen Coral66 mentioned; anyone here ever use it? I have a particular computer and military system in mind and am involved with its restoration.
Mike
Kinda. It has (or had) what it calls "Global Variables", normally shortened to "globals" which are databases on disk. You can open these and read/write them without having to know that they're disk based.
But ... they aren't tables, like a modern SQL database. They're tree structured, with variable length fields, which can also contain links to branches of the tree.
So you'd search for (say) a customer number at a given level in the database and once found, follow the link to the branch of the database containing all the information about that customer.
I kinda miss MUMPS, although having installed it on my Linux box, I no longer know why ...
Also very similar is Pick, which is still in use.
Remember that we are talking about a new, non-adult, programmer.
JavaScript is much more like C, from the point of view of such a person, th an, for example, are Pascal, assembly, APL, Forth, FORTRAN, DOS Batch.
It does not need to be purchased, since it can be executed in free Web brow sers sich as Firefox and Chrome (which have debugging tools). It does not need to be compiled. In that form, it is sandboxed; it should not be able to harm the system in which it runs.
But it can write to the system when run in an HTA or in Windows Scripting H ost, a matter of which Ferretygubbins would need to be aware.
Yup, loads of times alas!
(its kind of like Pascal with all the nice bits taken out)
Yup it was often used for MoD contracts. It kind of had a place many years ago when the amount of data throughput through systems was small, memory was scarce, and readability and maintainability of code was paramount.
Its a struggle to use elegantly for anything modern with a large amount of data to handle, since there are no user defined types, and the nearest thing you will get to a data structure is an array of integers!
(most of the development tools also suck to some greater or lesser extent)
Ah so you really liked it then John ;)
I am part of a team restoring a Bloodhound MK2 missile system launch control post operating only in simulation mode; it uses the Ferranti Argus 700 computer (see Wikipedia).
We now have it all working again despite it having spent about 25 years without power laying in a field. We have one Winchester drive left with the operational code but do not have the source code which was written in Coral66.
Our weakest link is the storage medium for being able to ensure that it will remain functional so are working on first a SCSI replacement (because it has been done before) followed by solid state. Whilst we have the source code for another version we would feel much safer if we had our own plus development tools ... always possible it is lurking on a tape in someone's attic as it is amazing what has surfaced!
It is intended to have the kit on display in a new museum by 2017 alongside a missile, launcher that is already on site and our Ferranti radar; find us at
Mike
IIRC it was really Algol 60 with all the nice bits taken out and some really nasty additions like bit field structures that never seemed to work and clunky I/O support (PDP11 anyway) that were the first things to be thrown away.
There seemed to be an unspoken pressure to use it because it was local though C was around at the time and much better suited to constrained environments.
Its shows doesn't it ;-)
Sounds like a good result.
With systems of that age its a not uncommon problem. Often a result of hardware production lines not really understanding the concept of software. I have seen a number of projects where it became apparent that changes were needed to some old software, and when asked where it was, all they could find was the master PROM that was kept in a secure cupboard in the production facility. That was the one they took from the shelf, and carefully copied to make each new board. As to where the source code was (let alone any more nuanced nicety like what configuration or build state the code on the prom was anyone's guess.
You may be lucky... I know of one GEC project where they dug some old Intel MDS development systems out of the stores, and by fluke found they had the required source code on disks that had been packed away with them.
Indeed!
The significance of whitespace still bugs me, although I'm learning not to grumble about it. The libraries are great, though; even the standard library is pretty rich.
Also a fair comment - again a block structured readable language. I normally use Pascal as a starting point since modern programmers might have a feel for what that looks like ;-) But it is indeed a derivative of ALGOL
Often because MoD specified it as one of the acceptable languages.
Whitespace should *not* be significant; there are no other contexts in life in which it is. This idea is just a throwback to the days of FORTRAN.
There is another language where whitespace is significant; OCCAM...
Gordon
Whitespaceshould*not*besignificant;therearenoothercontextsinlifeinwhichitis.
Cheers
Very witty; have a banana.
Consider my OP to be altered to "Whitespace beyond a single whitespace char should not be significant ...".
I'm sure there's a proper phrase that "whitespace other than a single separator char should have no lexical/semantic/syntactic significance ..." or similar and no doubt a proper computer scientist will be along in a minute to correct me.
Ah, a new way to insult my python colleagues... Excellent :)
If you don't hear from me after tomorrow, I'll be in Guy's Hospital...
IIRC it had been in some way 'validated for military use' and C had not...
There was IIRC some pressure to make compiler not be too smart in case the code they turned out wasn't what was expected..this was relevant for real time programming.
Does what it says on the tin is good practice for things that go bang, as against does lots more stuff and occasionally has a mind of its own...
>
I was in tears of frustration after keying on my first z80 assembler program EXACTLY as the sample was p[resented in the manual. Yea, even unto the single leading space on every line that the typesetter had added to make it look 'nice'.....
I know nothing of Python. In Forth (that most noble of languages) whitespace - whether one or more spaces, tabs, returns or line feeds - is essentially the only separator.
So I'd agree with your modified statement. I remember a long time back having to count the spaces when entering numbers into a Fortran program, otherwise you'd get a wrong answer.
Oh, thanks for the banana.
Cheers
Whatever the choice, programming a version of Langton's Ant (see Wikipedia) makes an interesting first project.
Cheers
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