Subj : Re: year 11 maths survey
To   : comp.programming
From : gswork
Date : Mon Sep 12 2005 01:36 am


Richard Heathfield wrote:
> 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

was it the fore runner to REXX, IBM EXEC perhaps?

> 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.

programming is in this regard *not* like riding a bicycle!

(actualy, in most regards its not like riding a bicycle!)

.