Explorations

{ 6 } Comments

1. chuck | 2007-Mar-19 at 13:34 (@607) | Permalink

   Hope for good things here.

   BTW, Python was out 4 years before JAVA, see this neat timeline. And Basic and FORTH were interpreted and there was a “universal” byte code whose name I can’t recall that enjoyed a short vogue back in the day. The byte code was too slow for the hardware of the time and never got anywhere.

2. Charlie | 2007-Mar-19 at 13:41 (@612) | Permalink

   Yup. (I think you’re probably thinking of p-code, although forth’s threaded interpretive model could be thought of as a sort of virtual machine as well. And Fred Brooks and Gerrit Blaauw were building machine interpreters in, of all thing, APL. And of course the PCC portable C compiler worked against a virtual stack-based machine too.) But what I think is interesting is the other aspect — that there are business models around that basically say if we make everyone richer, it will make us richer.

   BTW, you get official first post ever.

3. chuck | 2007-Mar-19 at 17:30 (@771) | Permalink

   that there are business models around that basically say if we make everyone richer, it will make us richer.

   I think some things are just headed towards commodity infrastruction, like roads are today. Probably operating systems, wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and programming languages are in that category. For such things community effort makes sense and it’s nice to see that government, beyond providing copyright, was not needed to bring it about.

   I think you’re probably thinking of p-code

   That’s it. What I thought JAVA brought to the table were JIT compilers and garbage collection.
   Speaking of FORTH, there was a wonderful Kafka pastiche published in Computer Languages in an April fool’s issue way back when titled My Life as a FORTH Interpreter, or some such. It was pretty accurate and wonderfully done. I’ve been looking for a copy ever since I lost the magazine.

4. Charlie | 2007-Mar-19 at 17:39 (@777) | Permalink

   Here’s the guy. Computer Language April 1986.

5. chuck | 2007-Mar-19 at 19:50 (@868) | Permalink

   Hey, google finds it now. Did you catch this bit from the same issue.

   The C programming language is descended from the languages B and BCPL (short for Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s horse). It is a highly structured language. The following structured program, for example, is well-known to all C language programmers, and prints a well-known message at the terminal (try it!):

   #define TWENTYNINE 29
   int ll, L1, l0, h_1,q,h1,h;
   main(){
   for(putchar(putchar((h=7)*10+2)+TWENTYNINE);
   l0?putchar(l0):!h_1;
   putchar (ll),L1==2?ll=’ ‘:0){
   L1++==0?(ll=l0=54

6. chuck | 2007-Mar-19 at 19:51 (@869) | Permalink

   Hmm, looks like comments have a size limit.

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