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Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran. I think the failure to keep the single-CPU per
by dboreham 4y ago
Quick note that there were compilers for other languages. Definitely C. Probably Pascal. Not sure about Fortran.
I think the failure to keep the single-CPU performance edge was probably mostly about lack of money vs the competitors. Obviously related to not selling enough of the first generation chips.
- __d 4y agoThere were: Rowley did Modula2, there was a GCC port, there was an Ada port, and various others, commercial and open source. But the Transputer architecture, which was stack-based, didn't lend itself to easy ports of most existing compilers, and they were slow to arrive and slow when they did. The article also discusses the reasons for the lack of follow-on investment.
- gnufx 4y ago> Not sure about Fortran. There was -- used for scientific computing on things like the Meiko Computing Surface, though not by me.
- UncleSlacky 4y agoYes, I was taught Fortran* which featured built-in parallel calculations for matrix operations (which fed into Fortran 90 IIRC) as well as Occam, and was allowed to play with the university's Meiko Computing Surface (generating fractal landscapes in real time) but not actually allowed to program them.