On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 10:26:23 -0500 Bruce Black <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
:>At Carnegie Mellon U (Carnegie Tech) in the 60s, Computer Science was :>only a graduate degree, so I took math with a computer option. :>They offered a systems programming course which I took in my last :>semester. The instructor had no idea what to do, so he just assigned a :>team of students to work on a compiler implementation (actually as I :>recall it was a compiler-compiler whose input was the BN form which :>defined the language). :>Anyway, it was independant study, meaning that he met with us twice and :>turned us loose. Our team divided up the task and I took disk I/O :>routines. We never got it working, but the team leader turned in the :>listings of what we had in a big computer output binder. I got a C in :>the course and never understood why. Some years later I found that the :>team leader had put my listings in backwards. so you couldn't read them :>without undoing the binder, which was apparently too much work for the :>instructor. :>So I am not a systems programmer but I play one on the Internet. At Northeastern Illinois they had a few systems programming classes (late 70s). One was to write a compiler, so I wrote a compiler for a PL1 subset (in PL1) that generated assembler code. Did not implement I/O instructions, but it was callable from Fortran. It came out to about a box of cards - I probably have it around somewhere. Another was database, where I wrote a program that would take a database definition, validate it and report on it. Of course, I started earlier, since the university "hid" the IEHLIST and IEHPROGM programs (because some students tried all sorts of "interesting" examples) so I wrote my own IEHLIST to display all the datasets on a volume and members in PDS's (used OPENJ). BTW, the secret library was SYS$.LINKLIB. -- Binyamin Dissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.dissensoftware.com Director, Dissen Software, Bar & Grill - Israel Should you use the mailblocks package and expect a response from me, you should preauthorize the dissensoftware.com domain. I very rarely bother responding to challenge/response systems, especially those from irresponsible companies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
