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Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

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Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#21

Post by bojan »

xxs wrote: post #10
gus_massa wrote: post #2

It feels like Pascal in Cyrillic. Autotranslation, with a little manual correction, but I can't fix КНЦ (autotranlated to KNC): FUNC FACT (N); NAME: R; 1 -> P; FOR I FROM 1 TO N :: R * I -> R ALL RES: R KNC; FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 :: ? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(N) ALL;

>It feels like Pascal in Cyrillic replace cyrillic w/ russian and it'd be ok. КНЦ = end (конец in russian is end). However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' (as in sewing thread) and it has lots its meaning of end, aside from 'from needle to thread' expression where it means from the tip of the needle to the end of the thread. Also 'ALL' (и все = it's over/that's all), which should be 'end' as in begin/end in pascal. T…

Being Serbian, I also find equalising Cyrillic with Russian mildly annoying. Or even worse, when people call it "Russian letters".

With that being said, I do think it's harder to make a clear programming language based on is a Slavic language, due to all the case and gender forms.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#22

Post by przemelek »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #15

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

But they simply weren't able to sustain it.

In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.

In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.

Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.

While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#26

Post by xxs »

stodor89 wrote: post #16
xxs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It feels like Pascal in Cyrillic replace cyrillic w/ russian and it'd be ok. КНЦ = end (конец in russian is end). However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' (as in sewing thread) and it has lots its meaning of end, aside from 'from needle to thread' expression where it means from the tip of the needle to the end of the thread. Also 'ALL' (и все = it's over/that's all), which should be 'end' as in begin/end in pascal. T…

> However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' You can use "конец" for "end" in Bulgarian too, even though it's antiquated.

... and it has lots its meaning of end

it's in the original post

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#27

Post by vbezhenar »

przemelek wrote: post #22
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #15

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a sta…

I think it's a bit different.

USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.

It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#29

Post by nivertech »

This Soviet project developed two Russian-language PLs: Robic[1] and Rapira[2]. Robic was similar to Logo, but unlike Logo, which had only one actor - a turtle, Robik had several: a Train, an Ant, a Painter, and so on

Rapira was more like SETL + Python. It was a dynamic interpreted PL with a rich set of compound data types, such as sets, records (associative arrays), and so on. Compared to the contemporary BASIC, it was ADVANCED

Like Logo, Robik was used to teach programming to kindergarthen-age children, while Rapira was aimed at high school students

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robic / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BA

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira / https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80...

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#30

Post by grishka »

By the way, there's one Cyrillic programming language still in wide use today. It's part of 1С (1S), an ERP system that's absolutely everywhere in Russia.

The language itself is quite similar to Visual Basic. It's awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout, but I was told that there exist special layouts just for it.

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