[TUHS] [multicians] History of C (with Multics reference)

Bakul Shah bakul at iitbombay.org
Wed Feb 17 15:51:06 AEST 2021


On Feb 16, 2021, at 8:14 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 16 Feb 2021, John Cowan wrote:
> 
>> In particular, doing gotos by assigning to a variable is very old-school APL.
> 
> I spent a fun year with APL\360 in CompSci, but could you please elaborate on that?  I know; this is an ASCII window on my MacBook so you won't be able to show the code :-)

The goto operator is "-> label", while assignment is "var <- value"
In Ken Iverson's 1962 book "A Programming language" he shows branches
by showing flowchart like arrow connecting a source stmt to target
but he doesn't use any goto or branch operator symbol or labels. So
not sure what John means.

As a grad student I did part time programming for a prof doing research
in cancer epidemiology. I convinced him to let me use APL instead of
PL/I but the "funny money" quickly ran out and it was back to PL/I!


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