Hoare, Communicating Sequential Processes, and JCSP

[James Hague]

Ulf Wiger wrote:

>Personally, I've written exactly
>as many lines of *PLEX as I have COBOL,
>i.e. not a single one.

I wish I could claim that, but I can't :)  I remember being told that it was
fairly rare for someone to write new "blocks" (as PLEX modules were called),
as most AXE work involved extending existing code, but I wrote at least
three in three years, at least that I can remember.  One of the great
horrors was that all of the code in a block had to be in a single file, so
you'd end up with these 20,000 line monstrosities.  But at the same time,
each block couldn't generate more than 16 kilowords of code.  PLEX was a lot
like BASIC, in that you couldn't pass parameters to subroutines except by
setting variables before the call.

Strangely enough, back in 1993, someone showed me printout of snippet of
Erlang code that he picked up when in Stockholm.  All I remember thinking
was "Wow, that's really weird."  The formatting of it was crazy, not like
typical Erlang, kind of like old Lisp code that didn't make good use of
indentation.  I wish I still had it.

James