Jim Hall wrote: > > I am working on an academic project that requires understanding the MAD > > programming language so I can pick apart (and faithfully recreate) an old > > MAD program. That's the Michigan Algorithm Decoder, from 1959 and the early > > 1960s.
tom ehlert wrote: > it would make this much more interesting if you would describe why this 1960s > program > does something interesting toda. I have an interest in document preparation systems, especially the early history of document preparation. I just find them fascinating - probably because I wrote a lot of documents at university using nroff and LaTeX .. but also because I earned my MS in technical writing and I teach a few university courses on technical writing, including one on "writing with digital technologies." So this program (Saltzer's RUNOFF) is in my niche as an academic, and I want to write a book for others in that niche. I admit this is a very academic exercise. This is not going to be on the New York Times "Best Sellers" list. If anyone sees it, it will probably just be others in my corner of technical writing. And I'm okay with that. :-) Jim Hall wrote: > > MAD is similar to original FORTRAN, tom ehlert wrote: > if wikipedia is right, NOPE. > according to wikipedia, it's 'inspired' by ALGOL60. and that is not even > remotely close > to FORTRAN. > Well, I knew MAD was originally derived from ALGOL60 but ended up in a completely different place. I should have specified that I don't know ALGOL60 .. but I do know FORTRAN77 (unfortunately). And I'm seeing similar things in MAD (like boolean comparisons) to how old-style FORTRAN did things. That's probably because FORTRAN and ALGOL60 were just similar in that way. Only so many ways to add instructions when they're punched on a card, for example. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
