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Machine-oriented languages generally are machine specific and play to a limited audience of systems programmers. As global optimization has become more standar

Machine-oriented languages generally are machine specific and play to a limited audience of systems programmers. As global optimization has become more standard and more accessible, machine-oriented languages have become less significant. Machine-oriented languages are "machine-oriented" because they provide the programmer with constructs which allocate resources (memory, registers) and allow programmatic access architectural features that are not comprehended by standard programming languages. The ultimate machine-oriented language is assembly language where programs are written in native machine code. When combined with a good macro processor, programming in assembler can be effective and satisfying. Writing good assembler code can be an exercise in restraint since it is easy to write incomprehensible programs that are difficult to understand and debug. Mark Rain (Ivan Godard) organized a conference on machine-oriented languages you might want to read. W. L. van der Poel (editor) Proceedings of a Conference on Machine-Oriented Language, Trondheim, 1973 North Holland, 1974. The CMU machine-oriented languge BLISS, PL360, and PL/S and others were influential in their day, as were the various Burroughs Algol systems. In fact, some Burroughs machines did not have an assembler and were programmed only in Algol (with extensions). There is a description of how the chicken & egg problem was solve and the Algol bootstrapped in Don Knuth's books.

wglb 9y ago
I do have significant experience in this area. I am looking to see if there are any in current use, ones that I haven't heard of. I have worked directly with two of these. Three of us wrote a compiler for a PL/M derivative in Bliss 36 running on the DEC PDP-10. And we tinkered briefly with PL32 on the vax. The team that brought XPL to the Sigma 5/7/9 series also wrote a low-level PL/S style language. I'm trying to locate the paper for that, so far with no luck. I'm familiar with the Burroughs low-level algol efforts, and am fascinated by the B 1700, which had an machine word size that was set on a per-program basis. Fundamental to this is that they are machine specific, and I am seeing that there are some possible advantages to that. Thanks for the references. As a result, I ran across http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages.pdf http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages... which connects with many of my memories. And the Belt architecture is quite fascinating, but it doesn't seem to be moving very fast. I now add to the list one called PL-11 for the PDP-11. I was first exposed to the chicken and egg problem in A Compiler Generator which launched my career in another direction. Thanks much for the rich references which are directly useful to my search. (montana expat here)

wglb 9y ago

I do have significant experience in this area. I am looking to see if there are any in current use, ones that I haven't heard of. I have worked directly with two of these. Three of us wrote a compiler for a PL/M derivative in Bliss 36 running on the DEC PDP-10. And we tinkered briefly with PL32 on the vax. The team that brought XPL to the Sigma 5/7/9 series also wrote a low-level PL/S style language. I'm trying to locate the paper for that, so far with no luck. I'm familiar with the Burroughs low-level algol efforts, and am fascinated by the B 1700, which had an machine word size that was set on a per-program basis. Fundamental to this is that they are machine specific, and I am seeing that there are some possible advantages to that. Thanks for the references. As a result, I ran across http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages.pdf http://143.95.72.211/ebooks/history_of_programming_languages... which connects with many of my memories. And the Belt architecture is quite fascinating, but it doesn't seem to be moving very fast. I now add to the list one called PL-11 for the PDP-11. I was first exposed to the chicken and egg problem in A Compiler Generator which launched my career in another direction. Thanks much for the rich references which are directly useful to my search. (montana expat here)