On 03/02/2015 15:29, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 03/02/15 13:47, John Rumm wrote:
On 03/02/2015 12:59, ChrisK wrote:
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

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

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.

Often because MoD specified it as one of the acceptable languages.


IIRC it had been in some way 'validated for military use' and C had not...

There was/is a standard set of test programs that a compiler must be
able to compile if its to claim to meet the standard, but I am not sure
if they got any more validation than that. C was (at least in the
80's/90's viewed with much suspicion in UK defence circles), just
because of its lack of readability.

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.

Yes very much so - hence why things like C++ were used sparingly since
it was far harder to mentally "count the cycles"

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...

Alas most^h^h^h^h all the CORAL compilers I have used tend to fall into
that category as well! (not to mention frequently being the slowest
thing you can do with a VAX short of rolling it up hill).



--
Cheers,

John.

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