Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Tim Rentsch Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++ Subject: Re: "C Is The Greenest Programming Language" by: Chris Lott Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2022 15:48:24 -0800 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 26 Message-ID: <861r15sz3r.fsf@linuxsc.com> References: <86v8zl29yr.fsf@linuxsc.com> <86lezftoq5.fsf@linuxsc.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="d40b94b342f96ad99b493372f9984bf0"; logging-data="13427"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+4QxY2DTQh4RkWS7aelf0U7H+P2DUPmt4=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:PZwWeNLcl5NM3ES7b/jWWqyVweo= sha1:0Hp3MKap7HiEUk/HrY2Q+W8EQwI= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c++:82810 legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) writes: > Tim Rentsch spake the secret code > <86lezftoq5.fsf@linuxsc.com> thusly: > >> legalize+jeeves@mail.xmission.com (Richard) writes: >> >>> Smalltalk and LISP Machine environments are really quite different >>> from what we assume computers are like today. [...] >> >> Lisp machines are special purpose hardware. Smalltalk VMs >> run on standard hardware, much like Java bytecode interpreters >> do today. > > I was thinking of the Smalltalk workstations from the 80s like those > made by Tektronix. I don't think they used a VM, but ran on the bare > metal. As I recall Tektronix was one of four companies licensed by Xerox to port a Smalltalk-80 VM to other systems. One motivation for offering these licenses was to help debug the writing in "Smalltalk-80: The language and its implementation", where most of the implementation part was about how the VM works and how to write one. Given that, it would be strange if the Tektronix effort did not use a VM but instead ran a standard Smalltalk image on bare hardware.