Bill,

> Thanks Wirt - I must be one of the few sites that doesn't even have an SPL
>  compiler - the Latin, I suppose, of the HP3000 world ;-)

When we bought our first HP3000 in 1978/9, SPL was included in the FOS (or at
least so we thought). But in fact, we didn't get it. It had been deleted just
days before our order, so we didn't get it initially. The price went from
free to something on the order of $5000, so we didn't buy it either, especially
given that we didn't know if we needed it or even much about it.

Years later, in the mid 1980's, HP obsoleted SPL and took it off of the price
list in preference for Pascal. At that point, our CE, knowing that we didn't
get it initially, gave SPL to us for free, since it was no longer a product --
and we've used it ever since (once we figured out how to use it; it's not all
that obvious if you skipped your ALGOL classes in high school). Pascal
displaced SPL as HP's preferred programming language for the HP3000, at least for a
brief time.

Now that essentially everything is obsolete, I would be pleased to put SPL up
on our web server, in the same manner as we do BASIC/V, if someone in CSY
would give us permission to do so. It certainly can't cause any harm to anyone
[SPL may not even be on the price list any longer (it's come and gone several
times)], but its presence there will do the homesteaders some good.

BASIC is a fine language for high-speed development, but it's only useful for
true commercial product development if a flurry of SPL routines are written
to handle all of the speed- and efficiency-critical routines, especially I/O.

Wirt Atmar

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