On 15/09/21 04:10, Michael Nolan wrote:
> I started programming in 1967, and over the last 50+ years I've
> programmed in more languages than I would want to list. I spent a
> decade writing in FORTRAN on a GA 18/30 (essentially a clone of the
> IBM 1130) with limited memory space, so you had to write EFFICIENT
> code, something that is a bit of a lost art these days. I also spent
> a decade writing in COBOL.
>
> I've not found many tasks that I couldn't find a way to write in
> whatever language I had available to write it in. There may be bad (or
> at least inefficient) languages, but there are lots of bad programmers.
> --
> Mike Nolan
> htfoot@gmail.com
I remember programming in FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1130 at Auckland
University. My first attempt to explore Pythagorean triples was written
in FORTRAN on that machine. Finally had a useful program written in
Java about 30 years later. There are 4 triples starting with 60 that
satisfy A*2 + B^2 + C^2 where A < B < C and the numbers are mutually
prime. I was able to handle values of A up to the size of long, so I got
some pretty big numbers for B & C. Java's BigInteger class has its uses!
On the IBM 1130 it was faster to use X * X to find the square of a value
than to use the power notation (of which I've forgotten the syntax).
And for my many sins, I spent years programming in COBOL.
I've written code in over 30 languages. Probably had most fun writing a
couple of trivial programs in ARM2/3 assembler -- all instructions
except one are conditional.
There is no one perfect language, despite what some people might insist!
Cheers,
Gavin
