@rockedge
Digital? PDP-11? Oh, I remember Digital! Didn't Ken Thompson develop Unix on a PDP-7?
I remember my first program on a 'batch machine' running IBM punched cards.
And Fortran? Remember that? Students handed in a pack of punched cards held together by two rubber-bands.
After that I wrote Pascal (remember Pascal?) using a teleprinter and a line oriented editor.
That used a
lot of paper! I wasn't a good programmer, but I loved the structure of this language.
But, in the end, the demands of enforced data-types became a constraint, not an advantage.
Not every type of precision is good!
Anyway, I started this thread because some helpful person on the Murga forum corrected my 'language'.
I decided improve my use of language (no more bad language!) and this posting is the result. (Thanks to whoever ...)
In the late 70s I used an 8-bit machine by Processor Technology, running PTDOS operating system.
The entire OS ran in 12k
bytes (not words) of memory; this included 4k of system managed buffer.
The 8 inch floppy disk was firm-sectored, ie the sector size was variable.
The largest sector size for a file was 4k (one full track). The smallest: 128 bytes. That meant very effective use of disk-space.
I remember writing a device driver that was a little short of 256 bytes. This was for a character oriented printer.
The OS knew only files: A directory was a file. The keyboard and monitor screen were files.
(I wonder where that idea came from? Hmmm?)
The system had a null file, an error file and a log (verbose) file that would record the history of every command issued to the command-line interpreter. None of this is remarkable now; but
all this was done in 8k bytes of object code.
There were elegant commands for managing a project.
It was possible to back-up every file associated with a project using a command: "save".
>SAVE O=file{,/u} {,T=type}{strings}{S={-L}{-I}}
The 'string' allowed a comma-separated regex-type list of names; if a project contained source, image code and documentation files an entire project could be backed up to a single floppy using this single command. (Remember floppy disks? 8 inch disks? Really?)
That comment might be a batch file with a short name. Thus:
>SETIN bakup (or similar). This allowed error-free work to be done quickly.
The point of all this? The precise use of language/definition can save a
lot of time in the big bad world of software. I'm not a precise person myself, but I
do like precision.
Still - much as I dislike Windows, I don't mind the substitution of 'folder' for 'directory'.
But I have now started on a peripheral topic, so I'll finish.
СОБАКА