Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

True.

In many early computer programming documents the term "order" was used instead of "statement", where "order" was meant as a synonym for "command" and not as referring to the ordering of a sequence.

View on HN

Occasionally, but much more often (as in Mauchly's cited paper) an "order" was a machine instruction, not a high-level language "statement".

Yes, but that is mostly because in the first few years (including by the time of Mauchly), there were no "high-level" programming languages, so the "orders" composing the text of a program corresponded to instructions directly executable by the machine.

I believe that the term "statement" has been imposed by the IBM publications about FORTRAN, starting in 1956.

Before the first public documents about IBM FORTRAN, the first internal document about FORTRAN, from 1954, had used the terms "formula" for anything that later would be called "executable statement", i.e. for many things that would not have been called formulas either before or after that, like IF-formulas, DO-formulas, GOTO-formulas and so on, and the document had used "sentence" for what later would be called "non-executable statements" (i.e. definitions or declarations).

Before FORTRAN (1951 to 1953), for his high-level programming language Heinz Rutishauser had used the term "Befehl", which means "command". (For what we name today "program", he had used the term "Rechenplan", which means "computation plan".)

I suppose if your only tool is a formula translator, everything looks like a formula?

"Plan" is really a much better term than "program". My next compiler will be called "plantran" for "plan translator". "pt" for short.

I have named the experimental languages I am toying with "Plan <x>" (for Programming LANguage, but also because it is a good term as you pointed out). Originally I was using numbers (probably would skip "Plan 9" like Microsoft skipped Windows 9) but the experiments went in different directions and implying an order was misleading. So I switched to star names: Plan Sirius, Plan Rigel, Plan Vega...

Are you writing up your results anywhere?

Not yet, and if I publish any of the languages I will probably use a different name (like "Oak" -> "Java"). Though I did call the unfinished language I published "BLA" (Baby 8 LAnguage - an attempt to see if I could fit an interpreter and editor in 1KB) so I might stick with the stupid names after all.

https://github.com/jeceljr/baby8/tree/main/examples/bla

Hmm, you might want to rename that: https://strlen.com/bla-language/

An interpreter and editor in 1K sounds very challenging! Do you mean 1K of Squeak bytecode? Including vectors of literals and selectors?

Thanks for the link - at the time I did a quick search and didn't find that or any other language with that name.

The 1KB target was for Baby 8 (the associated processor) binary code. That processor had a few quirks (like only indirect addressing outside the "zero page") and the language design partly reflected that. Seeing other people fit Lisp into less than 512 bytes made me think I had sacrificed too much functionality for size.

The incomplete Squeak code was just a quick test to see if the language made sense at all before wasting time doing the assembly version.

It looks inspiring! Does Bla have any kind of indexing or aggregate data structures? IIRC Tiny Basic had one array that was the leftover part of memory, which is enough to do a lot.

You have to manually carve up the heap into arrays if you want to have more than one. If variable F points to the start of an array then F,I@ will read F[I] while 42!(F,I) is an assignment F[I] := 42. The comma operator is just to convert a word index to a byte index, so F+(2*I)@ and 42!(F+(2*I)) also work but are uglier.

The sieve example uses a single 8Kword array https://github.com/jeceljr/baby8/blob/main/examples/bla/siev...

Oh, nice!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com