Description
The 50th anniversary of Simula, the first object-oriented programming language, was held at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo on 27th September, 2017. James Gosling, the inventor of Java, gave overwhelming credit to the legacy of Simula in his lecture. He mentioned that a number of programming languages nowadays compile to JVM. During his lecture, I began to wonder - why has no team made a simula implementation in java, written in java that compiles to java / java virtual machine(JVM). Inspired by the lectures on the Simula Jubilee, I began to ask myself if I should try to make a Simula implementation using today's tools. It should certainly be a Recursive
Descent parser followed by traditionally checker and a code generator.
Most of the code generator was rather straitforeward except a few points: Quasi-paralell Sequencing and Simula's old fashion goto-statement.
I will explain how the new concept of delemitted continuations can be used to implement coroutines and QPS, and, if we have time for it, how Java's exception handling together with byte code egineering can be used to re-introduce goto in the Java Language. An open source project was established creating a full-fledged Simula Implementation
strictly after 'Simula Standard'. See: https://portablesimula.github.io/github.io/
Bio:
Veteran Software Developer, born may 1946. I started as a young student at Norwegian Computing Center in 1967. Worked in Simula implementation teams on various platforms from the very beginning. I had a central role in designing the Portable Simula System in the 70's.