From news.daimi.aau.dk!news.uni-c.dk!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news2.near.net!das-news.harvard.edu!spdcc!iecc!compilers-sender Mon Sep 26 11:13:12 1994 Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.lang.misc,alt.folklore.computers Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!news.uni-c.dk!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news2.near.net!das-news.harvard.edu!spdcc!iecc!compilers-sender From: esr@netaxs.com (Eric Raymond) Subject: Retrocomputing Museum Progress Report Message-ID: <94-09-125@comp.compilers> Keywords: history, comment Sender: compilers-sender@chico.iecc.com Organization: Netaxs Internet BBS and Shell Accounts Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 23:21:01 GMT Approved: compilers@chico.iecc.com Lines: 151 Xref: news.daimi.aau.dk comp.compilers:7296 comp.lang.misc:16701 alt.folklore.computers:71974 This is followup on my "Languages From Hell" offer (which is the contents of the file CHARTER referred to below): THE RETROCOMPUTING MUSEUM (manifest and progress report #1, September 20th 1994) The Retrocomputing Museum is dedicated to programs that induce sensations that hover somewhere between nostalgia and nausea. Many are emulations of languages that were once important, but are now merely antiques. A few are games and curiosities that recall bygone ages, nice if you want to be able to demonstrate to the younger set what life was like back when programmers were real men and sheep were nervous. The Museum site is ftp:locke.ccil.org:pub/retro. The curators of the Museum are: Eric S. Raymond John Cowan Summary list of packages in the Museum: algol-60, cfoogol, focal, intercal, jcl, mixal, oisc, pilot, teco, trac, wumpus Following the package descriptions is a "COMING SOON..." section describing current Museum projects, and a want list of specifications and implementations we'd like to add to the Museum. See also the file CHARTER. LANGUAGES algol-60 An interpreter for Algol-60, the common ancestor of C, Pascal, Algol-68, Modula, and most other conventional languages that aren't BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL. Correctly described by Edsger Dijkstra (one of its co-designers) as "a great improvement on many of its successors". This distribution includes TeX source for the Algol 60 Report. cfoogol A compiler for a very, very tiny subset of Algol (no procedures, even). More a demonstration on how to write a recursive descent parser than anything else. Generates stupid but portable C code. focal A very archaic educational language, ancestral to MUMPS. This implementation is due to be replaced shortly by a better one. intercal A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. Said by the authors to stand for "Computer Language With No Pronounceable Acronym". jcl The JCL shell. If you ever wondered what programming an IBM/360 was like, here's your chance to find out. No man page, but there is an included sample `Hello, World' JCL deck that it will run. mixal An implementation of the MIX pseudoassembler used for algorithm description in Donald E. Knuth's "The Art Of Computer Programming", vol I. This preliminary release doesn't do floating point and has little documentation as yet, but it works well enough to be used in conjunction with the book. oisc You've heard of RISC, Reduced Instruction Set Computers? Well, here is the concept taken to its logical extreme -- an emulator for a computer with just one (1) instruction! Sample programs in the OISC machine language are included. pilot The reference implementation for IEEE standard PILOT, a horrible language designed in 1962 on IBM mainframes that a group of ancient academics was still insane enough to be using in 1990 --- and not only using but *standardizing*. I (esr) wrote this implementation as a weekend hack. teco Yes, it's the Editor From Hell...the infamous TECO, bane of lusers and tricky, unforgiving tool of master hackers. Build this to find out (a) what we lived with before Emacs, and (b) how expressive line noise can be. I have POSIXified the code. Note: this is 1986 TECO, there's a newer 1993 version that doesn't POSIXify cleanly. trac An extremely funky computer language based entirely on macro processing. There is an interpreter written in Perl, and a text file documenting the language and the implementation. This implementation is by John Cowan . GAMES wumpus A faithful clone of the classic Hunt The Wumpus game, exactly as it appeared in 1972 on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. Also includes an original but strangely similar game, superhack. COMING SOON TO THE MUSEUM dibol (John Cowan) Digital's Business Oriented Language, born on the PDP-8 and later moved to the PDP-11. Compiler in Perl, but generates Standard C. Comes with a Posix-compliant library that does almost all of the real work. DIBOL is like COBOL, dumbed down as far as possible.... algol-60c (John Cowan) The real Algol-60 compiler. Will generate GNU (non-Standard) C. This is the big project, and won't be available for a while yet. Magnus Olson is working on a BCPL-to-C compiler. Jonathan Chandross is building a better FOCAL. Richard Wendland is working on an Algol-68-to-C compiler, to be available in mid-1995. POSSIBLE FUTURE PROJECTS plankalkul (Eric S. Raymond) An implementation of the very first high-level computer language ever, Zuse's Plankalkul for the Z-3. I'll write this if I get enough docs on the language to do it, and Matthias Neeracher is working on that. plmtoc (?) There is a PLM/386 parser and symbol-table manager available, plm-parse, at iecc.com:pub/file/plm.shar.gz. This ought to be turned into a PL/M-to-C compiler. bliss (?) The Museum has an incomplete BLISS-to-C compiler. We're looking for someone to finish it who has BLISS and/or VMS experience. THINGS WE ARE ESPECIALLY LOOKING FOR Implementations, or softcopy specifications, for the following languages: Plankalkul, IPL-V, RPG, JOVIAL, CORAL, JOSS, POP-2 or POP-10, 1401 Autocoder, MAD, PL/M. Sample programs to add to the distributions for the following languages: FOCAL, ALGOL-60, JCL, TECO. -- Eric S. Raymond [Nitpick: I believe that Focal and MUMPS were unrelated, despite some syntactic similarity. Focal was basically as much of JOSS as the author could squeeze into a 4K PDP-8. -John] -- Send compilers articles to compilers@iecc.com or {ima | spdcc | world}!iecc!compilers. Meta-mail to compilers-request@iecc.com.