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

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:00:17 -0500 "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
wrote.

>Mostly I did 6502 (at home on my 8-bit Commodore machines)
I did some 6502, but for the BBC Micro instead of Commodores. Nifty little
set of opcodes, and you could do inline assembler right there in the middle
of a BASIC program, which was dead handy at times.

Learning assembler taught me more about programming than any experience
before or since. Oddly, the skills didn't transfer very well to 80386
assembler, at least there was a large plateau in the learning curve, and I
just quit. Maybe I should have started with pure 8088 assembler and worked
upwards from there.

>and
>VAX 11/7x in college - quite the exemplar of CISC, with its single
>opcode for solving an Nth-degree polynomial.
I'm struggling in vain to remember the specific opcodes, but the TMS32020
had some truly byzantine operations, like tritransitive add, multiply, store
and ick like that. It was designed for DSP applications, but that didn't
strike me as a particularly worthy excuse.

>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. :)
The first programming language I ever learned was Forth, aged about 6 IIRC.
Oddly, today I couldn't tell you one end of a Forth statement from the
other, although I have an ingrained understanding of RPN.



Paul