🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4024@convex.UUCP> thu...@convex.com (Robert Thurlow) writes:
>a...@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Al Thompson) writes:
>>I once worked with a guy who'd had a CS prof tell him that Lisp was "the
>>only language in which it is possible to code the Towers of Hanoi".  Well,
>>my friend thought that just a little absurd.  So, every time he learned a
>>new language he'd code up the Towers of Hanoi and send the listing to his
>>old prof.  One day he learned TECO.
>
>This brings back fond memories from my undergrad days!  The University
>of British Columbia always used to have, on display for it's open
>house, solutions to the Towers of Hanoi in every language known so
>far.  They had it in Pascal, C, FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL*, COBOL and
>others, but the ones I remember best were written in FMT and Texture,
>two text formatting programs popular on campus at the time.  I don't
>know if they had a TECO version then, though ...

Amazing. This group just appeared on our machine, and here is an anecdote
about me. It was actually a friend (who new better) who told me, and the
language was SNOBOL. He actually meant to imply impossible to write a one
liner to do it, but I took him at his word and have been sending him listings
for twenty years! I wish I kept them.  I did it in:

CUPL (Cornell's batch answer to BASIC)
ALGOL
PASCAL
BCPL
C
FORTRAN
LISP
FORTH
STOIC
STAGE 2 (A bizarre macro language)
KAMAS (Outline "processor" with programmability)
Modula-2
Smalltalk-80
TRAC (symbolic implementation -- no math functions used!)
BASIC
TECO (of course!)
Various assemblers
PDP-11 Macro assembler (the macros would expand into the system calls
   necessary to print the answer)
Bourne shell script
HP 19C calculator
Tek 31 desktop calculator

There have been more, but those come to mind.

As far as TECO is concerned, I ported a PDP-11 TECO to PDP-11 UNIX, to use
instead of ed (this was pre-vi days, and there was no EMACS around either).
The most unusual thing I did was write a text formatter (justification and
font changes) that worked with Tektronix 4025 terminals. What was particularly
interesting was that it was used as a filter! You'd pipe text into it, and the
output would go to the display. The TECO command line allowed specifing macros
to preload, and the macros were, in fact, the formatting program. By the way,
my version originally didn't have the "make love" joke, but when I brought
the TECO up to standard, the builtin startup macro had the TECO code to
echo "not war."

Tom Almy
to...@tekgvs.labs.tek.com
Standard Disclaimers Apply