Talk:FOCAL (programming language)

message: Gosh, that takes me back!  I first used FOCAL on a PDP8-L in 1969 mumble mumble ... Anyway, the TYPE command always preceded numeric output with = on that implementation.  Richard Pinch 06:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: FOCAL comes from JOSS, both of which bear resemblance to the POSIX/UNIX BC language. C-BC, which you can find on GitHub, is a large superset of BC language made like C, that also supersets most of GNU BC, and happens to also be a near-superset of FOCAL - enough so, for instance, to be able to almost verbatim port the FOCAL implementation of the Lunar Lander TTY-based game, which is included in the C-BC repository. An implementation of FOCAL, itself, may go up alongside it, soon.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.29.226.169 (talk) 09:09, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

message: The article has FOCAL as a short name for FOrmula CALculator, but the book archived at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp8/handbooks/programmingLanguages_May70.pdf as well as an archive copy of DEC-08-AJAB-D PDP-8-I FOCAL Programming has it listed as
    Formulating On-Line Calculations in Algebraic Language
BTiffin (talk) 17:41, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Acronym? 

message: IINM, It's not statically nor dynamically typed. Focal has no data types at all (more precisely, has only one type - real). 89.208.93.254 18:16, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dynamically typed ? 

message: Please do not remove the link to the focal.ie article. It is not "extraneous", as both articles have very similar names. Stephen Shaw 21:25, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lexicographical Website 

message: I removed the following link.  Google turns up no such implementation anywhere, much less at code.google.com. --Vrmlguy (talk) 10:18, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pruning dead link 

message: Well, there are some old hackers here! I remember those 4 Teletypes (ASR-33s) clacking away, and watching the front panel of the PDP-8/L blinkenlights was a sign of how heavily loaded the CPU was.  Having the extra 4K of memory was a big deal back then.  The OS was called the Quad operating system, IIRC. Of course, 4 Teletypes would load the CPU with just 40 interrupts per second when printing. I appreciate the humor within the phrase, and hope we can keep that language in the article. Kd4ttc (talk) 22:31, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I share your appreciation, but sadly the fun police killed it. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 15:23, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "nary a pause" - Great line! 

message: I added a paragraph about coercing strings to numeric by prepending a zero, and testing string entries.  It might also be useful to add something about exactly what 'E' means when numerically evaluating a string; as I recall it actually meant "times ten to the power of" so pretty much any string with more than one 'E' would overflow. 108.237.205.1 (talk) 21:14, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Testing strings 

message: It appears that Carleton College used to have its own FOCAL dialect called FOCARL. I have however not been able to find better quality sources for article inclusion. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 15:17, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  FOCARL