bhaskar (10/18/82)
We acquired Macrospitbol for our PDP-11/70 (RSTS) several years ago, and found it to be very high quality software. Unfortunately, the PDP-11 architecture is too restrictive for that implementation to be really usable (if I remember correctly, it had around 6K words available for total dynamic memory (user's program + data)), but the compilation as well as the execution speed were truly impressive. When I switched to Unix, I asked DISC about a Unix implementation (they had a VMS one), and a year ago, I was informed that it was almost ready. Like all good software, it too can be believed in when it is seen... But I would like to put in a good word for Macrospitbol itself: if I want to write truly portable software, my two choices would be Macrospitbol and Mainsail.
mat (10/19/82)
For purposes of information, SPITBOL, as refered to in previous news items, appears to have first been developed at Courant/NYU, where the person in general charge of Academic affairs is RBK Dewar. In the version that I saw, it was advertised to run at least an order of magnitude faster that anyone elses SNOBOL4
ark (10/20/82)
Several people have said things like "I've been waiting a year for Macrospitbol that will run under VAX/UNIX and it hasn't appeared yet." Well, you guys, you're right! But it IS actually going to appear in the near future, probably by year end. Evidence for this is that we have agreed here to make rabbit a beta-test site and we have actually RECEIVED the preliminary release. There are still some rough spots, but they will be ironed out quickly. If people out there in net-land want to send me benchmarks to run, I will run them and mail back results (unless I get too many!).