I'm sick & tired of the myth of PEMDAS

Oh, my! That brings back memories of FORTRAN assignments in 1974 where one had to read in punch cards of postfix notation and convert them into “standard” equations and vice versa.

I recall a similar assignment, but using 8088 Assembler to read standard notation and convert to stack-based RPN for the assembler to process. A VTC process through and through.

* VTC = Very Tedious Coding

I remember my VLSI Digital Design class where we basically built a DEC PDP-4 and then tested it with assembler assignments like that. To get started, we would tediously enter some “book strapping code” as a series of eight on/off switches and an incrementer-of-memory button which gave it just enough “smarts” to interface with a paper-tape-roll reader----which would then give it enough smarts to hold an assembler in its memory. And then we could deal with the actual assignment.

Oh my. I hated assembly code. I prefered my PASCAL.

1 Like

There might be a PASCAL’s Wager cartoon in your future :slight_smile:

1 Like

Unfortunately, you and I would probably be the only ones to get the PASCAL joke.

I don’t know if I have told this story before. I worked for the university computer center in grad school and I was the “official” consultant listed for any issues or questions people had about the PASCAL compiler for the CDC 6600. One day I got a letter from the Dept of Philosophy asking me if I was willing to serve on discussion panel. Of course, I was baffled until they told me, “We’ve been told you are the foremost Pascal authority on the campus. In addition to participating on the panel, we hope you can perhaps also give a brief overview of Pascal’s defense of Jansenism.”

At first I thought I was being pranked but it was for real. I guess he thought I was some doc or post-doc specializing in Pascal’s philosophy/theology.

2 Likes

:joy:

But did you show up?

No. And to avoid any embarrassment at my vast ignorance of Pascal’s philosophical positions, I used my Descartes escape route:

Or at least I think I did. (Or it was probably more of a “think not” that I did.)

[I also happen to like the Nike advertising allusion in that cartoon.]

2 Likes

You are not alone. Even the buttons were better than other calculators, and RPN was fast and intuitive once your were used to it.

1 Like

I still have my 40yo HP 15C on my desk. The ‘innards’ and the buttons are fine, however the markings above the buttons have degraded to the point that they are barely legible, as has the “HP-15C” logo.

I recently had to explain Pascal to my youngest nephew’s flatmate, who was taking a Comp Sci course at the time – the idea of a language that exists almost-solely to teach computer programming seems to have fallen by the wayside.

1 Like

PASCAL was also “revolutionary” in its day for very tight variable-typing—and so bugs were flagged by the compiler rather causing huge problems “out in the field.” The $18 million NASA period-instead-of-a-comma was an example. A DO-loop because a variable assignment—or something like that.

I built my most lucrative software system entirely from PASCAL code, back in the day. (And the exe file was fairly small when I scaled everything down to the new IBM 256kb systems.)

1 Like

… which brings up the tongue-only-partly-in-cheek description of three programming systems:

“Assembly language: very powerful, exciting, and dangerous – like flying on the outside of the airplane.
C: Has all the power of assembly language, with all the readability of assembly language.
Pascal: more a set of things you aren’t allowed to do than a set of ways to do things.”

3 Likes

That brings back memories.

This thread made me do a search on what computer languages were most popular ovver which time periods. I eventually came across this helpful video:

I must admit I was surprised to discover how big Pascal was in the 70s and early 80s. By the time I was doing Computer Science in the mid-to-late 1980s (UCSD Pascal loading from floppies on original-ish Macs), Pascal seemed to have dropped out of the conversation except as an introductory language in an academic context. The impression was that C was the default for ‘real’ programming, with various object-orientated languages being the ‘next big thing’.

I suppose it’s not surprising that, back in those pre-internet days, I would have developed a fairly limited understanding of such historical contexts.

I never had any contact with Assembly. I did have some exposure to LISP (which I hated) and COBOL (in a Commerce-faculty computing paper – I remember it as being cumbersome to write). Other languages that were around, but I wasn’t exposed to personally, were Ada (apparently one of the lecturers was a fan, but the general consensus of their students was that it was dire) and Prolog (used for the AI course).

2 Likes

Several years back a new professor wanted to use some routines in the FORTRAN IMSL library, and I was the only one who knew enough to help him. One of the details he didn’t know was that all programming statements start in column 7, which lead to a discussion about punch cards and batch programming.

AND if you have an hour to burn, this video is contains a lot of programming humor. The presenter set out to create a new programming language with all the worst features of other languages. :wink:

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.