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Re: polyglot programming, Recent history of vi

From Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups comp.os.linux.misc, alt.folklore.computers
Subject Re: polyglot programming, Recent history of vi
Date 2025-12-16 00:00 +0000
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <10hq7ek$29cri$6@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References (1 earlier) <10h175s$2b64m$19@dont-email.me> <mpjfqaFo7f6U3@mid.individual.net> <10h29pm$30833$1@dont-email.me> <10h2am5$2lt7$1@gal.iecc.com> <10h4bmr$3ci5f$1@dont-email.me>

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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On Sun, 7 Dec 2025 16:58:03 +0000, Andy Walker wrote:

> (b) You're right [of course] about portability, but in 1960 that was
> of limited interest.

It simply wasn’t practicable back then. The Algol 60 spec ignored the 
whole I/O issue because it was simply too hard. A few years later, Algol 
68 made a brave attempt at tackling it, at the cost of adding great 
complexity to the core language. Fortran had its own approach, but I’m not 
sure how portable that really was.

It wasn’t until the coming of POSIX that we had a properly platform-
independent I/O model that everybody could (be persuaded to) adopt.

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Re: polyglot programming, Recent history of vi Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-12-16 00:00 +0000

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