[TUHS] Were cron and at done at the same time? Or one before the other?

[John Cowan]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 7:00 PM Harald Arnesen <skogtun at gmail.com> wrote:


> Now THATS's a sane language. I have never used it professionally (or
> much at all), but I can see it's what Algol-687 should have been.
>

I studied A68 in detail with a friend of mine in 1976, and I've always
admired it greatly.  The van Wijngaarden two-level used in the original
report was rather opaque, though the revised report was much more readable
(and did not only the syntax and the static semantics, but the dynamic
semantics as well).  Only when I got a hold of an actual A68 textbook years
later did I actually see a straight grammar of the language, which got me
interested in the language again.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if A68 had become the
medium-level language of Unix, and Pascal had become the language of
non-Unix, instead of both of them using C.  (The four segment registers of
the x86 mirror exactly the way Pascal pointers work: it is statically known
whether a pointer points to the stack, the code, the data, or the heap
segment.)



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone,
unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose,
he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.   --"The Pyre of Denethor"
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