Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 07:18:26 02/06/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 06, 2004 at 00:23:34, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On February 05, 2004 at 21:01:52, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>On February 05, 2004 at 14:57:32, Bob Durrett wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>Quote from an MSNBC article:
>>>
>>>Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (formula translation), the
>>>original “high-level” programming language, would seem to be the infotech
>>>equivalent of cuneiform. But it’s still widely used, especially in scientific
>>>computing. Why has this Eisenhower-era veteran outlasted so many hardware and
>>>software generations? “It’s partly the learning curve,” says Hewlett-Packard
>>>Laboratories’ Hans Boehm, former chair of the Association for Computing
>>>Research’s special-interest group on programming languages. “For some people
>>>it’s good enough, and it’s hard to let go of something once you learn it.”
>>>Adaptability and compatibility, which made Fortran the programmers’ lingua
>>>franca in the 1960s and ’70s, are also key to its viability. Major upgrades have
>>>boosted efficiency and added features while preserving old versions intact. So a
>>>vast number of tried-and-true Fortran 77 programs jibe with the current Fortran
>>>90. Microsoft, take note.
>>>
>>>Maybe chess programmers are missing out on the best language of all!
>>>
>>>Bob D.
>>
>>
>>
>>"Chess", the mythical chess program of the '70 programmed by Slate and Atkins,
>>was programmed in Fortran.
>>
>>I think it was a bitboard program.
>>
>>Bob will tell me if the above is incorrect (most probably it is incomplete).
>>
>>
>
>:)
>
>Close.
>
>Chess through chess 3 was written in Fortran. Chess 4.0 was written in pure
>CDC assembly language, although they did a lot like I did in Crafty and used
>lots of macros to hide much of the ugly details. I had a copy of their code for
>a long time as Harry and I used it as a sparring partner many times as we worked
>on making Cray Blitz faster...
>
>Chess 4 was their first bitboard program. Slate later wrote a program that he
>originally called chess 5 (this was written without Larry Atkin) but he later
>chose to call it "NuChess" instead. It was once again written in Fortran for
>portability as I made arrangements for him to use a Cray just like we were
>using, at a couple of ACM events.
>
>So perhaps you were right after all, although I suspect you were talking about
>"the big mama" chess 4.x that beat most everything around. It was, as I said,
>written in "Compass" which was CDC asm.
>
>Of course you could claim you were talking about the last "chess" program and
>then you are 100% right. :)
I thought that Chess 4.x was a bitboard program and was written in Fortran, so I
was half-wrong. :)
I even managed to mispell the name of one of the authors! :)
Christophe
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