Page 1 of 1

Nostalgia

Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2012 1:25 pm
by JohnS|Dyalog
This will bring tears to the eyes of the old folk:
Whatever happened to O<backspace>U<backspace>T ?

Re: Nostalgia

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:36 am
by Roger|Dyalog
See http://keiapl.org/anec/#emulator .

Since the APL\360 source code http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/ is now publicly available you can build your own version of it and bring O<bs>U<bs>T back to life.

Re: Nostalgia

Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 5:28 pm
by neeraj
ok so I admit I don't know (that is a good thing) what O<backspace>U<backspace>T is ? Will somebody shed some light on this?

Re: Nostalgia

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2012 1:18 am
by Roger|Dyalog
"Quote-quad" input t←⍞ is formerly used extensively to solicit terminal input from the user. If the programmer made a mistake, e.g.

      ∇ t←foo
l20:
t←⍞
→l20

then there would be no way to interrupt or escape from the erroneous program. The sequence o<backspace>u<backspace>t was introduced so that if the user entered that, an INPUT INTERRUPT is signaled on the line that contains the quote-quad input.