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Date:Mon Nov 26 23:24:46 1992 
Subject:Re: A little Pop history (POP-10) 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID:921126.04 

ray@philmtl.philips.ca (Ray Dunn) writes:

> Date: 26 Nov 92 05:45:54 GMT
> Organization: Not Philips.
> ....
> I have no recollection of Pop10, but POP-2 (please notice the capitalisation
> and the hyphen) for the PDP10 (later known as the DECsystem 10) was
> implemented by myself and Malcolm Atkinson ...

I think Julian Davies implemented POP-10 (I can't recall whether
there was or wasn't a hyphen) more or less from scratch using PDP-10
assembler because he did not wish to have any obligations to the
other version, owned then by Conversational Software Ltd. He also
had some preferences of his own, including having the Boyer-Moore
"ped" editor included in the system (i.e. not a library) also
implemented in assembler.

He made some other changes, but I can't recall what they were,
except that I seem to recall he allowed upper and lower case
characters and provided support for typing them in on upper case
only terminals, by toggling case conversion using a control
character.

I think he also extended the maximum identifier size so that it was
effectively unlimited. Previously it had been six, or eight
characters I think.

Sussex people and some Edinburgh people used Julian's POP-10 for
several years before Robert Rae's WPOP (WonderPOP) became available
with additional facilities, including processes and hased property
tables, plus typed arithmetic variables with associated compile time
optimisation.

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
EMAIL   A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk  OR A.Sloman@bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-(0)21-414-3711       Fax:   +44-(0)21-414-4281