Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use

["J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet@cox.net>]

On 6/7/2010 5:29 AM, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
> In<hugevn02qfa@news5.newsguy.com>, on 06/06/2010
>     at 11:15 AM, "J. Clarke"<jclarke.usenet@cox.net>  said:
>
>> I never understood this business of making a distinction between
>> machine  language and assembler
>
> The language level. In the case of my first assembler, the
> optimization.

If it "optimizes" then it's not an assembler, no matter what it might be 
called.

>> maybe they changed things after I stopped
>> working with assembler but in my day it was a 1:1 correspondence
>
> Not by 1960. Even before the macro era you had pseudo-ops that emitted
> no code and pseudo-ops that generated multiple words.

So?  Shortcuts to keep from having to repeatedly type a bunch of code. 
Don't do anything you couldn't do by hand and you are not compelled to 
use them.

>> and the only practical difference was that someone who didn't have
>> an  idiot-savant ability to remember numerical codes could learn to
>> work in assembler in a reasonable time.
>
> Maintaining your own symbol table would be labor intensive unless
> you're JvN; I vaguely recall that he refused to use assemblers.

He came down with cancer around the time that assemblers started to 
become common, too, and died shortly after, so one has to question the 
relevance of such an observation.
>
>> Perhaps he's looking for programs in microcode or something.
>
> ?
>
> FWIW, IBM used assemblers for the ROS on the S/360 and S/370; I don't
> know about other vendors.