[ILUG] introduction to programming

[John P. Looney]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 08:19:58PM +0100, philip at imageviewer.co.uk mentioned:
> Does any one remember Coral? No, not some GUI paintbrush! Coral 66 
> maintained much of the British defence and power systems for many years. 
> Then a leviathan called ADA snuck its proboscis in the door, only to be 
> outsnucked by an little upstart that didn't even have a proper name - 
> 'C'. (Believe it or not one of my lecturers was a guru in 'B'. yes, you 
> guessed it, the precursor to 'C'.)

 Meh. B was crap. There were loads of business-oriented languages like
Coral years ago. Thankfully they are mostly all gone (to be replaced by
more and more and more!). I think Comal was the one we did in secondary
school. Far too much like Basic for my liking. 

> It takes compiled 'C' 65K to print "Hello World". I worked on realtime 
> Coral systems that maintained the voltage levels on electricity 
> substations in the UK. Thousands of lines of code (albeit a lot of it in 
> 8080 assembler), squeezed into 48k on a purpose built Ferranti computer. 
> We were poor in those days - but we were happy:-)

 And likely still deluded.

$ cat hello.c ; ls -l hello
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) { puts("Hello World"); }
-rwxr-x---  1 valen users 2872 May 25 15:05 hello

> P.S. To all you Pascal affionados (me to). 

 Pascal's only saving grace was that it compiled into pcode first, and
shipped with a pcode->asm converter. So, you could write your own
language, and have that compile to pcode. That kicked ass.

John

-- 
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an IQ in double figures do nothing.
                                        -- Lucy Mangan