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Re: OT: PL/I was Re: Please welcome . . .

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Thursday, December 18, 2003, 17:00
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 08:01:50AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
> I've been an assembly language progammer since the > early 60's. Anybody remember the IBM 7090 or the CDC > 6600?
Ding! Ding! COMPASS! Was there ever a more screwed-up subroutine call/return mechanism? :) Mostly I did 6502 (at home on my 8-bit Commodore machines) and VAX 11/7x in college - quite the exemplar of CISC, with its single opcode for solving an Nth-degree polynomial. I don't understand the idea of doing Forth for fun, though. It's just too mixed-level for me. I want my high-level languages to be high-level, dagnabit. :) To circle back around toward conlanging, has anyone among the computer techie types here created a concultural programming language? I know there's a Klingon programming language called varaq . . . which doesn't feel very Klingon, actually. I mean, a stack-based RPN language kind of mirrors the "backward" syntax of tlhIngan Hol, and a functional programming language (rather than, say, an O-O one) mirrors the language's focus on verbs rather than nouns, but neither of those features is particularly alien in the realm of programming languages. Varaq is really a pretty typical stack-based functional language; it just happens to use Klingon keywords. I'd like to see something a little novel, like, say, tri-state arithmetic (to go with the demonstrated Klingon penchant for 3s, and the fact that the native counting system is ternary). Hm. Maybe Klingons use TrINTERCAL. Fits with the whole "pain is good" aspect of the culture . . . -Mark