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10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages:
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a "preposterous table I just made up." He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as "most significant" but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it's "mostly dead". Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what "significant in history" means.
So let's talk about some "mostly dead" languages and why they matter so much.
Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these are forgotten. Like most people have heard of Smalltalk, right? Also there's probably like a billion mistakes in this, because when you're doing a survey of 60 years of computing history you're gonna get some things wrong. Feel free to yell at me if you see anything!
Disclaimer 2: Yeah I know some of these are "first to invent" and others are "first to popularize". History is complicated!
<no-sarcasm>
If there were one perfect language we would all be using it already.
</no-sarcasm>
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @10:09PM (1 child)
Dartmouth DTSS BASIC was a compiler not an interpreter. You would input, edit, and save your source code using a line editor on your Teletype printing terminal. Lines starting with a digit were placed in the file being edited. Lines beginning with a letter were commands to the OS or to the editor. The RUN command would compile your source-code file, run the object code, and then discard the object code. There was a separate command to compile and keep the object code. I used DTSS BASIC from 1971 to 1973. See John Kemeny's 1971 book for details. Microcomputer BASIC's were interpreters to avoid needing a disk.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 30 2020, @02:29PM
I used a minicomputer in college that you probably never heard of. (Harris S-100 (no relation to the microcomputer bus), and os was Super Vulcan)
Among various language compilers and interpreters, it had BASIC.
This BASIC was very complete. Much better than most microcomputers. It also was available in two forms:
1. A batch compiler (eg, like FORTRAN, etc)
2. An interactive compiler
The interactive compiler is interesting. It acted in every way like an interactive BASIC interpreter. But each line was compiled as you typed it. It kept the source representation as well as a compiled set of instructions for that line.
The performance was in all ways the same as the batch compiler.
I can only speculate about how this worked. I assume that when you typed RUN, it had to patch all the Jump instructions from all GOTO and IF/THEN statements. I suspect that the last instruction of every compiled line of code was a JUMP to either the interpreter's "next line" subroutine, or maybe directly to the front of the compiled code for the next line of code.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.