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A comment on Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal. Parent comment

Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by tasty_freeze on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @11:45AM (#26556381)
One of the unexpected things is Dartmouth BASIC from 1964 had matrix primitives, despite being an otherwise primitive language. MS never took up the feature, but I know Wang BASIC did on their 2200 family of machines.

For example:

    10 DIM A(3,3),B(3,3),C(3,3)
    20 MAT READ A
    30 DATA 1,-5,7, .45,23,9, -5,-1,0
    40 MAT B=A:REM assignment
    50 MAT B=ZER:REM zero array
    60 MAT B=CON:REM all 1s
    70 MAT B=IDN:REM identity
    80 MAT B=TRN(A):REM transpose
    90 MAT B=(2)*A:REM scale
    100 MAT B=INV(A),D:REM invert array, determinant in scalar D
    110 MAT C=A*B:REM matrix multiplication
    120 MAT PRINT C:REM prints something close to an IDN array
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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by Someone on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @01:41PM (#26557822)
The first version of Dartmouth basic ran on a system with a whopping 20kB of memory (8k words at 20 bits each. See https://en.)wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series)

The GE-635 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series) that it ran on most of its life could have 4 CPUs, had protected memory and floating point hardware, and supported at least 200 kilowords of memory (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ge/GE-6xx/CPB-371A_GE-635_Syste...)

At 36 bits/word, that’s 900 kilobytes.

The first version of Microsoft basic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC) ran in 4 kilobytes (leaving about ¾ kilobytes for programs and data), so it’s understandable that it lacked some features (it didn’t even have else clauses in if statements, had SIN, but not COS or TAN, didn’t support integer or string variables, etc))

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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by tasty_freeze on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @09:47PM (#26562609)
No question it would not make sense in that original 4K or even 8K BASIC, but MS produced BASICs with much larger memory budget and the matrix ops never appeared (as far as I know).
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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by Someone on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @03:54AM (#26564574)
They added tons of stuff that made business sense to them. Apparently, matrices as built-in types didn’t. Nowadays, the language is powerful enough to implement them as a library (e.g. https://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.asp?ID=3682. Operator overloading became possible at some time, too. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...)

It’s not as if they don’t know matrices exist. Excel has matrix operations (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/mmult-function-40...)

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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by coliveira on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @12:02PM (#26556605)
Believe it or not, engineers were heavy users of BASIC in the first few years. And FORTRAN was created with the notion of matrix multiplication, so it was just natural that BASIC implementations supported matrix multiplication.
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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by pavlov on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @02:32PM (#26558484)
My grandfather was a construction engineer. I remember visiting his office around 1990 just before he retired.

His only computer was a Commodore 64 and he had written all the software himself in BASIC over the years, just translating a lifetime of professional experience into these little interactive programs on floppies.

Maybe the modern equivalent would be to use Excel.

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Re:Matrix multiplication inches closer to mythic goal by mamcx on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @04:50PM (#26560239)
Yeah, this is something pretty useful. I also add to even go beyond and go full relational, that is what I'm trying with https://tablam.org
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