Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Wed Jan 17 2024 04:32 am

On 16 Jan 2024 at 07:24a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  DW> I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal
 DW>  DW> the ACM back in college and had picked up the book.  Sadly, I let it 
 DW>  DW> a long time ago.
 DW> 
 DW>  te> I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
 DW>  te> theory.  :-)
 DW> 
 DW> I'm not sure.  By the time I actually joined the ACM, I got
 DW> Communications.  But I'm pretty sure that the back issues I read were
 DW> called "Journals of the ACM".  But I'm uncertain which had "Programming
 DW> Pearls", but I think it was Communications.

Communications was considered a journal at one point,
and contained a lot of articles that would be considered
"journal articles" these days, but was never "Journal of
the ACM" which is a separate publication.  It's kind of
weird, but in systems, most of the focus is on conference
publications, not publishing in journals (unlike most of
the rest of the research community).  So Communications
used to have a lot of papers that were kind of systems-y,
but much less these days.  Communications nowadays is
more like a magazine.

 DW> One of the things that surprises me as I get into vintage computers is
 DW> how much I mis-remember.

And how!  I hear you on that.

 DW>  te> Bwk, but yeah.  One of the problems was that they were
 DW>  te> working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
 DW>  te> have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
 DW>  te> to the language (like a string type).  It would have been
 DW>  te> interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
 DW>  te> Oberon.
 DW> 
 DW> Ya, the Software Tools was mainly about writing unix-c-like stuff in
 DW> various languages.  But C was becoming the dominate tool by then and
 DW> Software Tools in OtherLanguage wasn't that much in demand.

Software tools took on a life of its own outside of the
books, and was a thriving project for quite a while,
particularly in the minicomputer era.  E.g., it was quite
popular on Pr1me computers.

These days, of course, there's a C compiler for everything;
back then there was a Fortran compiler for everything, and
then a Pascal compiler for everything since that was the
language of teaching for so long.  Oberon was the last of
Wirth's languages, and in many respects, it was closer to
C than to Pascal; as such, it remedied many of the short
comings that Kernighan noted in his polemic about Pascal
(for example, in Oberon, the size of an array is not part
of its type, like in C).  Had there been an Oberon version
of the book, it may have been a more natural presentation,
like a C version, for many of the utilities.  Of course,
Oberon didn't exist at th time.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.