John Rumm wrote:
On 02/02/2015 15:49, wrote:
Lots of familiar languages but not seen Coral66 mentioned; anyone
here ever use it?
Yup, loads of times alas!
(its kind of like Pascal with all the nice bits taken out)
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.
I have a particular computer and military system in
mind and am involved with its restoration.
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)
Chris K