Re: Ada on punched cards?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Stephen Leake wrote in message ...
>Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever written an Ada program on
>punched cards?
>
>And if you have to ask "what's a punched card", you don't want to know
>:).
>
>Punched cards disappeared from the machines I had access to before
>1983, so I doubt it. But the topic came up recently, and I figured
>that's a perfect question for this group!


The very first version of Janus/Ada was created as the homework for the
compiler construction course (CS 701) at the University of Wisconsin.
The host machine was a Univac 1100/80. While we did most of the work at
the recently installed terminals, we did do some things on punched
cards. (The machine "charged" for each run, and batch runs were
"cheaper", so we could stretch out our "funds" by using cards.) The
coding was in an extended Pascal (which we later machine-translated to
Ada). But of course the test programs were written in Ada, and we often
ran test batches on cards. So, I suppose the answer is yes, but there
never were any real programs on the cards. And in any case, there was an
early Ada compiler on cards...

        Randy Brukardt.