[Beowulf] Parallel Development Tools

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Ellis Wilson wrote:

> Wow, PL-I, I'm learning about that in my language design class.  While it brought a bunch of new items to the computing field, can't say I'm upset I didn't code in it :).
>
> Sorry guys, I came into existence just about the time the internet was opened up from just NSF to commercial interest, so punch cards are a little out of my league.  I must say though, this certainly beats the heck out of a history of computing languages class any day!

When I learned to program in 1974 at Duke, they were teaching in PL/C,
an interpreted subset of PL/1.  The joke about PL/C was that it could
not fail (as a compiler)!  If you picked up a bunch of cards at random
from the computer room, stacked them up neatly, and fed them into the
queue under the right HASP cards to invoke the compiler/interpreter, it
would "correct" your syntax so that the compile would succeed, tell you
on the output form what it interpreted the input to be, and would then
compile and run the result.

Of course, "run" was usually an ugly, nasty, brutish and short demise,
but still...;-)

As far as the language itself goes -- it was actually a damn good upper
level language.  Beat the hell out of Fortran (which I learned later).
In the right Universe it might have given C a run for its money,
although at this point I will stop coding in C only when my dead, stiff
fingers are pried off of my keyboard, and am TRYING to only code in
maybe perl, bash and php outside of that.  And sometimes octave/matlab,
for reasons beyond my control.

    rgb

>
> Ellis
>
> Gerry Creager <gerry.creager at tamu.edu> wrote: Didn't you have a tic-tac-toe game on punch cards written in PL-1?
>
> John Leidel wrote:
>> Friends don't let friends play tic-tac-toe using punchcards :-)
>>
>> On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 11:20 -0700, David Mathog wrote:
>>> Jim Lux  wrote
>>>
>>>> and, as we all know, real developers
>>>> use paper: tape, tab cards, or, if they must, teletype rolls.
>>> You forgot paper tape.  (Most people who used it probably wish they
>>> could forget it too!)
>>>
>>> Anyway, all of the tools you mentioned are for wimps - real
>>> programmers load code directly into memory using the toggle
>>> switches on the front of the computer.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> David Mathog
>>> mathog at caltech.edu
>>> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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>

-- 
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
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