alt Hacker NewsSome interesting stuff you will get out of Dr. Dobbs articles, as someone that was an avid reader.
- The Small C compiler set of articles, where you will get the sense not even K&R C was used outside UNIX for quite some time, only a common subset.
- The toolbox articles creating a Turbo Vision like framework in Object Pascal
- The evolution of Python and related adoption
- Strange programing languages like Actor, C@+ (try to search this one nowadays), Sather, BETA
- The fashionable compiler benchmarks that used to be quite common back in the day
- The evolution of C and C++ at ISO, while their standards were being started
- A more heterogenous way of software development, when it wasn't only UNIX clones and Windows.
Replies
Catplus?
Edit: Yandex can search for it! But doesn't seem to find anything relevant.
(It also hates such queries and will force you to wait 2 minutes for a captcha to load.. but you get the results after a long wait! As our forefathers once did!)
I did find C@ and C@++ though.
A lot of very accessible algorithm articles too. I still remember the article on ternary trees.
Actor was fascinating -- basically Smalltalk made to look "more familiar" with a C-like syntax. It was created by odd-language designer Charles Duff (who had earlier created Neon, an object-oriented Forth).
'"C@+" programming language' query in Kagi returns a single hit from Esolang [0].
> C@+ (try to search this one nowadays)
I think not even Wikipedia knows about this (at least with a quick search)
I think it was C+@ (pronounced CAT, as I recall).
Edit: pasting a comment of mine from here in 2019 [1]:
The language is C+@ [2]. I dug up an article about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal, the October 1993 issue. This does not seem to be the article I am remembering, since it does not go into the instruction interleaving technique anywhere near as much as I remember, but they do mention it and say it was called "beading":
The binaries produced by the C+@ compiler are independent of the underlying machine architecture. Without recompiling, applications can be moved from SPARC to 68000 to Intel x86, and so on. C+@ is not interpretive--the binaries are encoded using a sophisticated 'beading' technique developed at Bell Labs. Because of the streamlined language design, the C+@ compiler produces these portable binaries with extraordinary speed, without the need for preprocessing or front ends.
This is from the article's introduction:
The C+@ programming language, an object-oriented language derived from AT&T Bell Lab's Calico programming language, was developed to provide programmers with a true object-based language and development environment. C+@ (pronounced "cat") has the syntax of C and the power of Smalltalk. Unlike C++, C+@ includes a mature class library with more than 350 classes used throughout the system. The C+@ compiler itself is written in C+@, and all of the source for the class libraries is included with development systems. The Calico project was started at AT&T Bell Labs in the early '80s, after the introduction of Smalltalk and at the same time as C++. Calico was originally used for rapid prototyping of telecommunication services; hence, its heavy emphasis on keeping the language syntax simple and showcasing the power of the graphical development environment.*
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583430
[2] https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/C%2b%40