Re: Programming language vote - results

[bosworth@waterw.com (James L. Ryan)]

In article <34565F22.5B66C13E@acm.org>, Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org>
wrote:

[snip]
> 
> I am talking about history and what DID happen. There was no serious
> attempt by any vendor to make APL fit into the ascii terminal world.
> There is NO doubt in my mind that this seriously hampered APL's acceptance
> as a popular language in the 70's and 80's.

In the early seventies Burroughs APL had a "keyword" mode which was
intended to make APL somewhat accessible from an ASCII terminal. When
keywords were enabled APL letters mapped into ASCII lowercase and APL
underscored letters mapped into ASCII uppercase. APL's special characters
were represented by mnemonics embraced by less-than and greater-than
symbols. Admittedly this was not intended to be a substitute for an APL
terminal, but was intended to allow "emergency" access to APL from a
non-APL terminal. With keywords on, and from an ASCII terminal, a line of
APL might have looked as follows:    

     average<is>(+/data)<div><rho>data<is><quad>

Burroughs also contracted, in the early seventies, with Memorex to build a
small number of terminals with 188 printing glyphs, 94 for ASCII and 94
for APL. These terminals could be either hard switched or soft switched
between the character sets. The encodation of the characters was based
upon the so-called APL/ASCII Typewriter Pairing overlay standard which was
agreed upon at the Atlanta APL conference. The inclusion of the dual
character set slowed the performance by a factor of two, but these
terminals were still faster than the then only alternative, the 2741 and
friends "golf-ball" terminals. Even though Burroughs attempted to sell
these Memorex dual character set terminals, the market didn't seem
interested.

[snip]
> 
> Not so. See above. It affects users and system administrators. Ever triedto
> explain to someone back in the dark ages why your APL system couldn't print
> a report with someone's name in Upper Case and Lower Case because APL
> only had upper case and underbarred characters?

Actually the ability to have computer output with both upper and lower
case didn't come about until the early sixties. The computers I programmed
in the late fifties used six bits instead of eight bits to represent
characters. Rather amusingly, the first computer I programmed had 32 bit
words which hosted five six-bit characters per word. You had the uppercase
alphabet, the numerals, and a variety of punctuation characters.

[snip]
>

-- 
James L. Ryan   --  bosworth@waterw.com