[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[Marc Rochkind]

This thread started to be about what I thought were system programming
languages (e.g., C, BLISS) and seems to have meandered into a general
discussion of languages that were around in the 1960s and 1970s, so, what
the heck, I'll add my own story.

PL/0 is an education programming language introduced in the book, *Algorithms
+ Data Structures = Programs*, by Niklaus Wirth in 1976. It's a great
language for teaching compiler writing because it contains interesting
concepts, such as recursive functions, yet isn't overly complicated. I
wrote a PL/0 compiler for the IBM 701 (
https://github.com/MarcRochkind/pl0compiler).

Yeah, that's not a misprint. I wrote perhaps the world's only 701 emulator (
https://www.mrochkind.com/mrochkind/a-701.html), and my PL/0 compiler runs
on it. Unfortunately, I can't verify that the compiled code runs on an
actual 701, since I'm sure there haven't been any in operation for many
decades. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, programming the 701
is really hard. It had no index registers, and the sign bit didn't
participate in shifts. Still, my compiler compiles full-blown PL/0.

So there! ;-)

Marc Rochkind

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 2:49 PM Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Perhaps the interviewer was looking for something dumb like the following
> and not a full RD parser?
>
> int count = 0;
> while (*cp) {
>         char c = *cp++;
>         count += c == '(' ? 1 : c == ')' ? -1 : 0;
>         if (count < 0) return -1; // FAIL: one too many )
> }
> if (count > 0) return -1; // FAIL: too many (
> return 0; // SUCCESS
>
> Though this will fall apart if you also want to also balance braces &/or
> brackets and must catch invalid cases like "(..[..)..]"!
>
> > On Mar 10, 2025, at 8:19 AM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> >
> > I was working at the whiteboard during a job interview once. I had been
> asked to write a function to report if its input had balanced parentheses.
> No problem: I wrote an RD parser in Python (which I prefer for
> whiteboarding) to detect balance and return True if the parse was
> successful and False if EOF was reached.
> >
> > I was starting to write some tests when the interviewer interrupted me.
> >
> > "What is that?"
> >
> > "It's a recursive descent parser. It detects if the input is
> well-formed."
> >
> > Blank look.
> >
> > I started to walk him through the code.
> >
> > He interrupted me. "Excuse me, I'll be back in a few minutes."
> >
> > Long wait, maybe 15-20 minutes. Someone else comes in. "Thank you, the
> recruiter will get back to you." That's the last I hear from them.
>
>

-- 
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