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

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