Algol 68 was the first programming language that was being taught at the University of Twente when I started studying there in 1981.
I vaguely remember something about a compiler (probably the Algol 68 compiler) with the wierdest bug that I have ever heard about a compiler: In certain months of the year, it had problems with compiling certain programs and students were adviced to try again a month later. The bug was never found.
I can imagine this scenario happening in Algol68 (or indeed any language), especially in the 1970s when memory was shared, unprotected and at a premium.
The scenario could have been a season batch job that corrupted some required shared memory.
But, Algol68 included four main aims and principles of design: Including Security: "Algol 68 has been designed in such a way that most syntactical and many other errors can be detected easily before they lead to calamitous results. Furthermore, the opportunities for making such errors are greatly restricted."
On the other hand, I did speak to an ICL engineer once, and he told a story of an ambitious ICL programmer adding a "Happy New Year" console to the Geroge OS (Written in Assembly language)
The ambitious ICL programmer decided it was too tough to test this one-off hack, and rolled out the OS update with his happy hack, untested.
The update seemed to run fine for a few months... Until months later (at New Year as it happens) all the ICL servers in New Zealand crashed, and two hours later all the ICL servers in East Coast Australia crashed.
This triggered a frantic call from the NZ ICL engineer to ICL in London England warning them of the impending doom in the UTC zone.
Yay... but this ICL Happy NY hack was probably written in ICL assembler.
Comments
Algol 68 was the first programming language that was being taught at the University of Twente when I started studying there in 1981.
I vaguely remember something about a compiler (probably the Algol 68 compiler) with the wierdest bug that I have ever heard about a compiler: In certain months of the year, it had problems with compiling certain programs and students were adviced to try again a month later. The bug was never found.
I can imagine this scenario happening in Algol68 (or indeed any language), especially in the 1970s when memory was shared, unprotected and at a premium.
The scenario could have been a season batch job that corrupted some required shared memory.
But, Algol68 included four main aims and principles of design: Including Security: "Algol 68 has been designed in such a way that most syntactical and many other errors can be detected easily before they lead to calamitous results. Furthermore, the opportunities for making such errors are greatly restricted."
On the other hand, I did speak to an ICL engineer once, and he told a story of an ambitious ICL programmer adding a "Happy New Year" console to the Geroge OS (Written in Assembly language)
The ambitious ICL programmer decided it was too tough to test this one-off hack, and rolled out the OS update with his happy hack, untested.
The update seemed to run fine for a few months... Until months later (at New Year as it happens) all the ICL servers in New Zealand crashed, and two hours later all the ICL servers in East Coast Australia crashed. This triggered a frantic call from the NZ ICL engineer to ICL in London England warning them of the impending doom in the UTC zone.
Yay... but this ICL Happy NY hack was probably written in ICL assembler.
On the other hand there was a nice little hack used by ICL in Algol68R that could be used today sniff out NULL pointer issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68-R#F00L