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From: arra@harp.camb.inmet.com (Arra Avakian)
Subject: Re: Comparison of languages for CS1 and CS2
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Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 12:53:08 GMT
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In article <3s75k7$cji@news.ccit.arizona.edu>,
Frank Manning <frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu> wrote:
> [...]
>After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I thought about it awhile, and I
>was intrigued. Assembler would give the students a peek at what actually
>happens in the guts of the machine, and maybe a higher-level language
>wouldn't be such a mystery after that. Maybe that approach makes sense.
>
>Hmmmm...
>
>-- Frank Manning

I found this worked for me 35 years ago (SPS for IBM 1620 + Fortran
II).  The SPS assembly language was believably dumb, revealing that the
machine was not mysteriously "smart". The Fortran II mystified me,
until I got to understand what a compiler was. By the way, this was
between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, at an MIT
summer course taught by Eliot Bird. (Is he listening?)

The Fortran compiler was quite literally awkward, consisting of
several boxes of cards. You fed your source deck following the first
pass of the compiler. It would punch out the object deck, which you
would feed back into the card reader along with what I think was the
linker/load/run time library. No disk or OS back then.

Arra Avakian
