Subj : Re: year 11 maths survey
To   : comp.programming
From : Richard Heathfield
Date : Sun Sep 11 2005 09:05 am

Ben Pfaff said:

> Richard Heathfield <invalid@invalid.invalid> writes:
> 
>> (Before I decided not to post my survey answers after all, I realised I'd
>> added EXEC to my "programming languages" reply - and I haven't written a
>> line of EXEC since about 1984.)
> 
> What is EXEC?  (Wikipedia thinks it is a family of operating
> systems including EXEC I, EXEC II, and EXEC 8.)

I don't mean any of those, I'm afraid. It's a bit like a cross between DOS 
batch files, Unix shell scripts, and JCL. :-)

Mists of time and all that, but it had a lot of ampersands in it. For 
example, if you wanted to shove a string onto "stdin", in preparation for 
running a program, you could do something like:

&STACK 12345

IIRC the language was Turing-complete, but you wouldn't want to write 
anything serious in it (and in any case I could be mistaken; at the time I 
knew it, I knew a lot less about such matters).

Sorry, I'm in a tearing hurry and I'm about at the limit of my recall 
anyway! Which just goes to show that, although I was once reasonably 
skilled with EXEC, I have not - for quite a few years - been in a position 
to claim it as a language I actually know.

-- 
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/2005
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at above domain

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