Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Bob Martin Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN Date: 26 Sep 2024 06:04:56 GMT Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: <5mqdnZuGq4lgwm_7nZ2dnZfqnPSdnZ2d@earthlink.com> <1r0e6u9.1tubjrt1kapeluN%snipeco.2@gmail.com> <87msjvprm3.fsf@localhost> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net sHFlNbIvIZwx32POQJGvGgNeUi9DEFY2n2Zlfiek4xzLnc4uYp X-Orig-Path: news.individual.net Cancel-Lock: sha1:c1W4r8DvRG1WSQJKUlLJrgD558Y= sha256:eLC4Iu7z/yu3fJlHiUjHiS/Z1i+xmjpdbvj8o7qIiag= In-Reply-To: <87msjvprm3.fsf@localhost> User-Agent: xnews (by Bob Martin, in ooRexx & ncurses) Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:227034 On 25 Sep 2024 at 17:31:32, Lynn Wheeler wrote: > > scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes: >> VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful >> extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language. > > I was at San Jose Research, but doing some amount of work out at Los > Gatos lab and they let me have part of a wing with offices and > lab. They were doing lots of work with "TWS", from Metaware (in santa > cruz) ... and had implemented 370 Pascal which they used for developing > VLSI tools. It was eventually released to customers as VS/Pascal. The IBM internal version was Pascal/VS > I used it to rewrite VM370 spool running in virtual address space and > some number of other VM370 features. > > In the early 90s, IBM was going through its troubles and selling off > and/or offloading lots of stuff (real estate, divisions, etc), including > lots of VLSI tools to industry VLSI tools vendor. However, the standard > VLSI shop was SUN machines and so everything had to be ported to SUN. > > I had left IBM, but got a contract from Los Gatos to port a 50,000 > statement VS/Pascal VLSI design tool to SUN. Ran into all sorts of > problems, it was easy to drop by SUN up the road, but they had > outsourced SUN pascal to a organization on the opposite of the world, so > anything required at least a day's turn around. In retrospect, SUN > pascal seemed to have been used for little else than academic > instruction ... and it would have been easier to have rewritten the > whole thing in C.