Is it a lost cause?

Especially today.

/BAH

Reply to
jmfbahciv
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if you're getting paid then it is commercial.

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Reply to
alister

For sure you can.

Just try alternative code till 'it works the way it is supposed to'

Then report the bug.

If its embedded code of course they will.

But try working that trick with e.g. Javascript bugs.

I had an issue that IE6 and Firefix did different things when evaluating stuff inside a conditional. One cast to char*, the other to int...when there was a number involved.

And no the Javascsript specification doesn't cover the exact case I found.

Well I used to marvel at what the gcc compiler turned out - better assembler than I could write myself usually.

Haven't peeked for years.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

She sure did!

Indeed. It took AGES to write IIRC, but was maintainable and the chief attributes of being a programmer were the ability to touch type accurately.

ISTR the chief attribute of assembler programming was the ability to write 60 lines of comment for 10 machine code instructions.

Each code block had a header that explained what it was to do, the inputs and the outputs, what registers or memory locations were used for what variables, and usually a chunk of pseudo code explaining the logic, repeated as line by line comments down the block

The advantage over COBOL was that spelling wasn't important :-)

The Joy of C of course was that you wrote it pretty much like assembler, but half of the comments were not necessary.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Looks like you are right. Sure can't remember ever having to use that.

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Reply to
Dan Espen

You actually lived and experienced that in real life?

Reply to
Osmium

Nope - she wrote the first compiler, for the A language in 1952. And she was responsible for MATH-MATIC (a scientific/engineering language and FLOW-MATIC (for business use).

However, COBOL was designed by CODASYL committee with Hopper acting as technical consultant.

It seems that COBOL was essentially an extension of FLOW-MATIC with some additional ideas from IBM's COMTRAN, e.g. the PICTURE clause.

It looks as if much of COBOL's procedure division came from FLOW-MATIC. From the code fragments I've found it looks as though FLOW-MATIC was a BASIC-like in using line numbers as flow control targets rather than COBOL's section and paragraph names. I haven't been able to find examples of FLOW-MATIC's data definitions so don't know if they fed into COBOL's data division.

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Reply to
Martin Gregorie

True enough because its quite verbose.

Thats not right at all. Back in the day, COBOL, like much assembler, was written on coding sheets, usually in block caps with a pencil, and passed to the card punch girls who punched and verified the cards before sending them back to you. Alternatively, you punched the cards yourself, on a machine punch if you were lucky, and on a 12 key hand punch in most of the places I worked.

Corrections were always made with the hand punch.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
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Reply to
Martin Gregorie

IBM has made a lot of changes in their OS through the years, maybe that's one of them.

Reply to
J. Clarke

I'd wait until the keypunch girl went on a break and jump in on her machine.

At the risk of being repetitious (what, HERE?) We used to have skeleton program decks with all the boilerplate all duped and ready. identification division: insert the program-id line and remarks, etc. If we were working on a system with a number of programs we could have the file-section and a bunch of data pre-coded as well. This plus library copy books for the record definitions and there could be remarkably little coding.

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Reply to
Peter Flass

So, Bitsavers probably has old JCL manuals. Go check. Among a number of

360 systems I worked on I never saw paper tape. I guess it was more common in Europe, for some reason. In the US it was common for typesetting, and I would guess for driving CNC machines, and neither of these were (AFAIK) big System/360 applications. More 1130s had paper tape, but All the ones I saw were card only.
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Reply to
Peter Flass

You need self modifying code to access array elements when the CPU does not support index registers. Index registers have been a standard part of computers for a very long time.

Reply to
Andrew Swallow

I think all processors have had the ability to load the contents of what a register points to.

THat is what a program counter or stack pointer does.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I am used to each line of assembler having a comment. Subroutines were commented at the top. No pseudo code.

Actually pseudo code would have been a dangerous distraction. When maintaining it I need to know what the code has to do (for a particular data value) and what it actually does. Then I can make the two the same.

Reply to
Andrew Swallow

Oh, you young folks.

Self-modifying code made interesting programs possible. Back in the heroic era of the 1940s and early 1950s, there were no index registers, no indirect addressing, just instructions. So to add up a list of numbers, the program loop patched the ADD instruction to change the address of the location to add. It seems like a kludge now, but the ability for the program to modify itself was a huge advance. Von Neumann described it in "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" but it's never been clear whether it was his idea or someone else's.

Fairly soon afterwards people invented indirect addressing and index registers to handle the most common code modification situations, although it remained common through the 1950s to squeeze that last bit of performance or fit a program into the tiny memories. The classic example is "The Story of Mel."

These days I agree, index registers handle most of the reasons you'd modify code, and computers are now fast enough that we can afford to do stuff the longer and clearer way. Of course, every time you compile something and load the code into memory, whether JIT or an ordinary program fetch, that's self-modifying code in action.

Reply to
John Levine

No, pseudo code is good, because that says what it has to do. To anyone coming along blind with a bug to fix.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Nope, although I can believe all the ones built since you started programming did. The PDP-8 I started programming on sure didn't. If you wanted to do that, you had to store the accumulator into memory and use that location as an indirect address.

Stack pointer? You must be new here.

Reply to
John Levine

well so it could load a memory address pointed to by another memory addrres? Thats an index regsiter, just in RAM rather than in the CPU.

Makes sene when you built te CPU out of TTL.

Are you telling me a PDP 8 didnt have a stack pointer?

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

TTY had paper tape ... univ. had a some 33 and one 35

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"the Model 33 ASR, (Automatic Send and Receive), which has a built in

8-level punched tape reader and tape punch;"

"The Model 33 was one of the first products to employ the then new ASCII code. A companion Model 32 used the more established five-level Baudot code. Because of its low price and ASCII-compatibility, the Model 33 was widely used with early minicomputers."

... snip ...

I don't remember seeing 1052 with 1054/1055 paper tape reader/punch (but common with tty)

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some people at science center

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came out Jan1968 to univ. installing CP67, it had 1052 & 2741 terminal support ... including dynamic terminal identification ... it played games switching the SAD CCW to switch port-scanner type on line and some trivial transmission to determine terminal type. I added the TTY/ASCII to support the univ ascii tty devices ... extending the dynamic terminal type games with SAD CCW for ascii tty.

I then wanted to setup single dialin phone number for all terminals (single "hunt group") ... but it didn't quite worked because they had taken short-cut ... while SAD CCW would change port-scanner type, the line speed was hard wired for each port. It worked for 1052 & 2741 because they operated at same line speed ... while TTY terminals were different line speed (requiring different dial in numbers for 1052/2741 and TTY). The dynamic terminal type still worked ... as long as the terminal was connected to port with correct line speed.

this was part of motivation for the univ to start clone controller project, take an Interdata/3 programmed to emulate mainframe terminal controller ... and do dynamic terminal line speed, reverse engineer channel interface and build channel interface board for Interdata/3. Later this was enhanced with an Interdata/4 to handle the mainframe channel interface and cluster of Interdate/3s handling the port scanner functions. Four of us get written up as responsible for (some part of) mainframe clone controller business with Interdata is marketing the box. When Perkin/Elmer buys Interdata, it is continued to be sold under P/E logo.

some past posts

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note that IBM help originate ASCII

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and tale of "the biggest computer goof ever", mainframe became EBCDIC (instead of ASCII)

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and for other drift, recent thread in ibm-main group referencing connection between cp/67 and ms/dos

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Multithreaded output to stderr and stdout

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Reply to
Anne & Lynn Wheeler

On 4 Jul 2016 12:42:03 GMT, jmfbahciv declaimed the following:

COmmon Business Oriented Language came out of the CODASYL consortium as a language that could be used on many computers (vs system specific assembly). Hopper was just one member of the team -- though the use of English like language, and device independence were heavily pushed by her.

If one trusts Wikipedia, she developed FLOW-MATIC -- which, with IBMs COMTRAN -- were the two main influences on COBOL.

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Dennis Lee Bieber

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