TRIP was first written in PDP-10 assembler although there was a later effort by Dave Dyer to rewrite it in itself. I don't know how far that got. TRIP had nothing to do with C. TRIP had its symbols in memory at all times. There was no distinction between compile and run time. It needed no separate debugger. You could redefine any or all routines at any time. Compilation was very fast, even with the old hardware. The 10's operating system had a feature whereby you could stop any run "on a dime" and save the complete program state onto disk and later resume operation exactly where it left off. TRIP had a few 10-specific features and was weak on data types, but these problems could have been fixed. It was used only at III and never exported to other machines. When I was later forced (due to no more PDP-10's being available) to work in C, it was a great comedown and a big step backwards. TRIP perhaps most resembles the Mathematica environment, without all the math and without lots of the other features of Mma. TRIP dates back to about 1967 when III was in Tech Square in the same building as Minsky's Project MAC. Quite a few people on this list were associated with us, including our host, Rich. Steve Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: <mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx> To: "math-fun" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Cc: <mcintosh@servidor.unam.mx> Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 5:29 PM Subject: Re: [math-fun] order codes
Quoting Steve Gray <stevebg@adelphia.net>:
At III for several years we had a DEC-10 based compiler called TRIP, which exceeded in capability and usability all the C compilers then in existence. It was originally designed by Lowell Hawkinson, a LISP expert. I still miss it.
You don't say what it compiled; presumably "C" although your comment implies that it might have been C-like but not following it exactly. Did Lowell write it in LISP, or directly in machine language? He also had one of the many versions of LISP and one of the few that I know of which was capable of handling arrays directly as arrays. But I am not sure that it ever got widely used. The last I knew he was at SDC in California, although I have heard that he later formed a company of his own.
- hvm
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