Re: No love for CORAL 66?
DEC's FORTRAN compiler was much more efficient..
I've told this here before, but we had a data centre full of VAXen and we were looking at possibly replacing some of them with a mainframe from a well known manufacturer. They actually delivered a test machine for us to try out, a whole room-full of big boxes!
The salesman gave us a tape with a FORTRAN program on it, which would "run for about a week" on the mainframe and several weeks on our test VAX. We should "load it, compile it, run it and call me in about a week, when the mainframe finishes its run".
He then left us to it. The ops put the FORTRAN tape through both machines, compiled the program and hit run simultaneously on both machines...
The salesman had a message to call us back, by the time he had returned to his office. The VAX had finished in about a second, his mainframe was still chundering away.
It turned out the FORTRAN compiler on the VAX was actually quite clever. It analysed the code: no input -> create a huge array -> fill array with random numbers -> no output. The compiler decided if there was no input and no output, there was no point running the bit in between, so it made an empty program stub. The mainframe compiler was not so clever...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
