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The SETL programming language

setl.org

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Re: The SETL programming language

#11

Post by nigwil_ »

shakna wrote: post #10
nigwil_ wrote: post #4

SETL has an interesting lineage and part to play in the history of computing: The original SETL was implemented in a language known as LITTLE, Dave Shields noted in an email: "SETL was implemented in LITTLE, a language based on FORTRAN that had fixed=length bitfields as a fundamental data type." Early SETL was used by Robert Dewar's team to implement the first validated Ada implementation, known as NYU Ada/Ed. This i…

> We have a printed copy of the original SETL based NYU Ada/Ed but we are still to find the original SETL implementation This got me interested. I may not have found what you're looking for, but I found something. The current git repo's first commit is "based upon SSoS2I 1.0.1" [0]. [0] https://github.com/herrmanntom/setlX/commit/ae1e8a16fb1c15d8...

interesting, someone has refined SETL2 into SetlX; I had not noticed that the SETL wikipedia entry has an entry for SetlX:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETL

In my other reply in this thread I highlighted the lineage of SETL, I neglected to also mention that SETL was an influence on ABC that influenced Python.

Re: The SETL programming language

#12

Post by magmasystems »

Oh my god! It's SETL.

After getting my Masters degree in the early 80s, I went to NYU for my Ph.D. with the intent purpose of working on SETL with Jack Schwartz. Unfortunately, by that time, Jack had moved on from SETL and onto the world of Robotics. Robert Dewar was too busy building Realia COBOL and was not taking on any additional Ph.D. students. So I floundered around NYU for a year before deciding to do my own commercial software, which was probably the best decision I ever made. Especially after seeing a lot of Ph.D. students at NYU who had been there for 10 years.

Re: The SETL programming language

#13

Post by winter_blue »

magmasystems wrote: post #12

Oh my god! It's SETL. After getting my Masters degree in the early 80s, I went to NYU for my Ph.D. with the intent purpose of working on SETL with Jack Schwartz. Unfortunately, by that time, Jack had moved on from SETL and onto the world of Robotics. Robert Dewar was too busy building Realia COBOL and was not taking on any additional Ph.D. students. So I floundered around NYU for a year before deciding to do my own c…

> before deciding to do my own commercial software, which was probably the best decision I ever made.

Just curious: what did you build, with your commercial venture/startup?

Re: The SETL programming language

#15

Post by joak »

I did my MSc thesis with setl and mathematica I, in 1989..

Some elements of setl eventually got their way into python ~15 years ago, namely: sets and list comprehension.

Archeology of programming...

Re: The SETL programming language

#16

Post by magmasystems »

winter_blue wrote: post #13
magmasystems wrote: post #12

Oh my god! It's SETL. After getting my Masters degree in the early 80s, I went to NYU for my Ph.D. with the intent purpose of working on SETL with Jack Schwartz. Unfortunately, by that time, Jack had moved on from SETL and onto the world of Robotics. Robert Dewar was too busy building Realia COBOL and was not taking on any additional Ph.D. students. So I floundered around NYU for a year before deciding to do my own c…

> before deciding to do my own commercial software, which was probably the best decision I ever made. Just curious: what did you build, with your commercial venture/startup?

I wrote one of the first word processors for Unix, and showed it at the first UnixExpo in the Javits Center in 1984. When the company that was marketing it went out of business, I ported the word processor to the IBM PC, and it became a very popular shareware word processor (New York Word). The income from New York Word was sufficient enough that I quit my day job and formed a software company devoted to making various productivity tools.

Re: The SETL programming language

#17

Post by nedbat »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #6

'As rms has kindly pointed out, the designation "GNU SETL" is incorrect until the sources have been released. I hope to correct this by making that release soon' Undated. From the Documentation page.

Nothing is dated, except the binary releases, which are all 10 years old.... :(

Re: The SETL programming language

#18

Post by jjtheblunt »

I parallelized the SetL runtime for shared memory multiprocessors, with dynamic load balancing, parallel GC, and added explicit parallel constructs, at Urbana-Champaign, from fall 1988 over the next couple years. It's weird, to me, that the global interpreter lock persists in Python, 3 decades later.

Re: The SETL programming language

#19

Post by JadeNB »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #18

I parallelized the SetL runtime for shared memory multiprocessors, with dynamic load balancing, parallel GC, and added explicit parallel constructs, at Urbana-Champaign, from fall 1988 over the next couple years. It's weird, to me, that the global interpreter lock persists in Python, 3 decades later.

> I parallelized the SetL runtime for shared memory multiprocessors, with dynamic load balancing, parallel GC, and added explicit parallel constructs, at Urbana-Champaign, from fall 1988 over the next couple years. It's weird, to me, that the global interpreter lock persists in Python, 3 decades later.

I don't think anyone thinks GvR is incapable of removing the GIL. Given the comparatively tiny base of installed SETL software, surely it's a lot easier to check that any backwards-incompatible changes to SETL won't break any important installed software based on it than it is to do the same for Python?

(And, as a follow-up, I think it's fair to say that there is no such thing as a fully backwards compatible change. My background is with Perl more than Python, where the problem is especially acute; but I imagine with Python too, it is very hard to make a change where one can be totally sure that the behaviour being 'fixed' isn't behaviour that some piece of software somewhere out there relies on being broken in exactly the historically right way.)

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