
The Napier88 Persistent Programming Language and Environment (1988) [pdf] - vmorgulis
https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/users/dave/papers/napier88.overview.pdf
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whitten
Does anyone here have previous experience with this programming system, and
how it would be implemented today?

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david-given
Well, I went to St.Andrews during the Napier days.

I didn't use Napier myself, but some of my colleagues did, and there were
frequent cries of 'aaargh! My persistent store has been corrupted!' followed
by rebuilding it from source.

But that's not really a criticism of the language itself, merely the
implementation, and I didn't have enough experience on it to usefully comment.

The university was deeply into pure research, doing stuff like pure research
on garbage collectors and theorem provers in Prolog (one of the lecturers
wrote a theorem prover package for the Mac that we used a lot. It was all in
Prolog. INCLUDING THE USER INTERFACE). But they were less good at the
practical aspects of software engineering; I remember one of the lecturers
arguing that we because our DEC Alpha workstations had 32MB of RAM, therefore
a twin-space garbage collector of 16MB per space would be optimal...

 _I_ did the persistence parts of the course in Smalltalk, which was so much
simpler.

The paper references PS-Algol and S-Algol. I did a lot of S-Algol; it was a
teaching language used by Glasgow and St.Andrews for basic algorithms courses,
the intention being to decouple the algorithm from the implementation. I quite
liked it, but --- remember how I said that practical software engineering at
St.Andrews wasn't so great? The Mac version had an IDE which _did not support
cursor key movement_. The Unix version _didn 't have a garbage collector_ (it
just hadn't been implemented).

Good times, good times...

