About programing, a general question

[Joep L. Blom]

On 18/12/10 12:28, Colin Law wrote:
> On 18 December 2010 11:23, Joep L. Blom<jlblom at neuroweave.nl>  wrote:
>> On 18/12/10 10:04, Colin Law wrote:
>>> On 17 December 2010 23:00, Joep L. Blom<jlblom at neuroweave.nl>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I agree with Kipton Moravec that ALGOL was a much better language but
>>>> that is understandable. FORTRAN was developed by engineers, ALGOL by
>>>> mathematicians. C is also developed by engineers (I rest my case: no
>>>> offence to engineers!!).
>>>> I differ a little with those advocates of C++ as implementation of OOP.
>>>> If you compare it with the implementation in PASCAL (look at Linux fpc)
>>>> you'll see that the implementation is much cleaner and better
>>>> implemented. But it is as with Windows: if the basic concept isn't sound
>>>> ( and that goes for C) than everything you build on that is flawed as
>>>> well. I hope I haven't insulted many people but it is my opinion ( and I
>>>> started programming with ALGOL in 1963).
>>>
>>> On what machine as a matter of interest?  Mine was an Elliott 803 with
>>> the equivalent of 32KB RAM in about 1967 at Lucas in Birmingham,
>>> England.
>>>
>>> Colin
>>>
>> COlin,
>> That was on the Electrologica X1 and later the X8.
>> They were machines build by a small Dutch company which later is sold to
>> Philips (then it was called Philips Electrologica). Several were sold in
>> the Netherlands but I don't know if they were sold abroad. They were
>> rather advanced machines build with the input from people like Edzge
>> Dijkstra (who was one of the developers of ALGOL) and others. I worked
>> on it from 1965 to 1969. I cannot remember the amount of memory. I know
>> the X1 had a low memory count. I used that one for making graphic plots
>> (curves of firing frequencies of neurons) where we used a curve-fitting
>> routine to match a theoretical models. It took approx.20 minutes for 1
>> plot so I interspersed the program I did it with with funny texts for
>> the operators after several plots (to get preference in processing!); it
>> worked.
>> On the X8 I programmed more elaborate statistics and theoretical models
>> but that machine was many times faster that the X1.
>> You can find information on these computers here:>
>> http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/X1.html
>
> Happy days!
>
> Colin
>
Agreed!