🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16c6bf80-d96e-4ce9-a968-bc00e01168c7@d19g2000prm.googlegroups.com>, Derek <derekrss@yahoo.ca> wrote:
>On May 8, 3:48=A0am, ppnerkDELETET...@yahoo.com (Phred) wrote:
>> In article <5d3988b0-f0ee-475e-9e30-5071a087d...@v26g2000prm.googlegroups.=
>com>, "R.Nicholson" <rhnlo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> >The article says that at 4 a.m. on May 1st, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz ran
>> >their first BASIC program on Dartmouth college's General Electric
>> >GE-225 mainframe.
>>
>> Interesting, before I read this I would have been happy to say the
>> language I was briefly introduced to on a GE-225 at UQ was BASIC.
>>
>> But that was in 1963! =A0So, does anyone out there recall what *was* the
>> actual "user language" on that beast in those days? =A0Attempting to
>> dredge the dark recesses of 45-year-old memory I find flutterings of
>> an answer... but nothing definite.
>>
>> Clearly, I didn't get sufficiently involved then to actually write a
>> program. :) =A0AFAICR the early lectures all involved matrix algebra
>> (which I'd never studied as such) and went so far over my head that I
>> decided I had better things to do with my time.
>>
>> I guess they were leading into a discussion of data arrays and such,
>> but they way they presented it was incomprehensible to me. =A0Buggered
>> if I know why they felt the need to do it that way -- arrays as such
>> are perfectly simple concepts. =A0Perhaps lecturers don't get paid if
>> they make things too easy. ;-)
>>
>> >(Thankfully, they continued program language development beyond
>> >their Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment , or this
>> >group [c.l.b.m] might have had the much less desirable name: comp.lang.DO=
>PE =A0:)
>>

Thanks very much for your response Derek.

>Just a guess, Phred, but it might have been FORTRAN II which is
>superficially quite similar to BASIC. FORTRAN II was certainly around
>in 1963. When I first learnt FORTRAN IV (in the 1970s) the examples
>were still all very "matrixy", perhaps because it was taught to me as
>part of a numeric analysis course. One of the things that I liked
>about BASIC was that it could do everything that FORTRAN could do plus
>it could handle text. Although you could handle text in FORTRAN IV it
>wasn't easy. 

You can say that again!  I spent a fair bit of '73 programming in F4 
(or something very similar) on the UQ PDP-10.  To print things like  
"<" or "&" I had to use the ASCII value in octal, insert it into the 
36-bit word as a 7-bit character, allow for the 36th bit, write out 
the binary string, then convert that back to octal to print it! :-)

To make it a bit easier I used a DATA statement.  For example:
DATA AND,LT,PERC/"231004020100,"361004020100,"225004020100/

>By comparison text-handling was a doddle with BASIC. In
>fact at the time the only generally available language which was
>better than BASIC was SNOBOL4.

Cheers, Phred.

-- 
ppnerkDELETE@THISyahoo.com.INVALID