At 8:07 PM -0800 10/5/02, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>Deep Historical Note --
>      Much earlier in the 60s Klaus did his best work with a typeless 
>VHLL -- Euler, ca 1965-6 -- that was an extreme generalization of 
>Algol (based on work by van Wijngaarten). This language had a 
>bytecode interpreter based on the orginal bytecode interpreter: yes, 
>the HW of the 1961 Burroughs B5000 designed by Bob Barton. (These 
>are very old ideas folks.) In 1967 I did to Euler what Simula did to 
>Algol to get the first Flex language, which was also run by a 
>microcoded bytecode interpreter (the first OOP one).
>

I haven't heard anyone mention Euler for a *long* time. When I was 
much younger and even more foolish, I liked Euler enough that I chose 
write a compiler for Euler for a class assignment. I chose to write 
the compiler in Snobol, probably for no better reason than that I 
wanted to get a feel for what it was like to write something 
non-trivial in Snobol. The result wasn't particularly useful (it took 
almost 500K to run the thing, so I had to get time on the mainframe 
at night) but I did learn from the experience.

-Martin