Re: language and program nostalgia

Andrew Reilly <andrew-newspost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 20:32:20 +0000, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

Here is one copy I found using Google's image search:

http://blog.tilos.hu/irodalmile2/Babel.gif


Still, there was already enough of them to fill that cartoon tower.

It's quite recent, since it has UNICODE at the bottom right. ;-)

There are a lot of languages there that I've never heard of (which isn't
saying much, I guess), but it makes me wonder: how many of these now
don't run on *any* working hardware? Were the programs written in them
translated into something else, or abandoned as their business reason for
existing shifted beyond their ability to be adapted?

As languages, I'd bet most of them are still running on
"contemporaneous" hardware, either inside virtual machines,
re-implementation, or in ulterior versions of the language with some
backward compatibility layer.

The programs themselves may not all work as is, since they may depend as
you noted, on some specific hardware or device (but they may also be
emulated, or the program may be modified).

Indeed, useful programs were ported or translated on the run. Smart
businesses learned soon to use perene programming languages such as
COBOL.

A lot of the less common languages are "experimental" languages or
domain specific languages. They are developed at one site, and used for
some time only there. For experimental languages developed in
universities, I'd bet sources running on some unix are (or were) often
available.

The situation may be difficult for old languages that were written in
assembler, on specific hardware. But anything a tad more general and
useful (eg. Algol) would have been ported to later systems, rewritten in
some other programming language or in themselves, and therefore may
still live on, be compiled/ported on current systems. Eg. there are
several Algol 68 compiler running on unix available, and if you want
Algol60, there's sources targetting MS-DOS that you could run in dosemu
on unix or that you could port to unix, which shouldn't be too hard.

In the next to worse situation, you have implementations such as LISP
1.5, written in assembler of some old hardware. Fortunately in this
case, the hardware is well documented, emulators are written, and there
are tools (assembler, linkers) rewritten or recovered to compile the
sources.

The creation of emulators & virtual machines is almost as old as
computers, it's actually a fundamental principle of computing. For
example (but it's probably not the oldest), the 1401 was emulated on
360, to allow people invested in 1401 autocoder programs to switch over
to 360 smoothly.

Have a look at http://www.bitsavers.org/



I know that I've written programs that now don't run on anything because
no examples of the original hardware exist, and they were tied too
closely to the peculiarities of the hardware to be worth "porting". I
keep listings of some of the particularly neat ones, hoping that I'll
find time to do something useful with them again...

Hardware can be emulated. "Interesting" hardware is emulated.


On a distribution like gentoo, there's about a hundred of programming
languages available, and more than a hundred of emulators. This is not
counting all the less common programming languages and emulators you can
donwload from the Internet. Use google ;-)


--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Not enough parallelism in programming
    ... >> Trying to model this in occam and I suspect in most any SW par language ... SW languages don't want or need the ... Funnily enough nor do some hardware projects if some simplifying ... simulation trades speed and simplicity for the event driven simulator ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: Hows dot.net doing nowadays?
    ... Windows applications not web based apps. ... nothing else just to feel that if I make the switch to other languages some ... I work with specialized hardware. ... In regards to Java, I hear alot of people are excited about Ruby on rails. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Multi Language support
    ... I am not a device OEM. ... know much about the internals of the hardware. ... displayed on the display for diagnostic purposes and some greetings involved ... multiple languages based on the user setting. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsce.embedded)
  • Re: Older Emulator OS
    ... >the hardware. ... Windows CE emulators are better predictors than were older emulators ... >> Embedded newsgroups? ...
    (microsoft.public.pocketpc.developer)
  • Re: Interview with Alan Kay
    ... > career I was a hardware engineer, and I worked in test engineering ... > non-gc languages, then it would be likely to die the same death ... > different architecture) by then, because your nice, crisp box will ... > a critical mass of buyers. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)