Do you remember how Kirkerud (the lecturer and textbook author) opened the semester stating with absolute certainty that AGI would never, ever be reached in our lifetime, or even the next several centuries?

I don't, but I mostly ignored the lectures as I'd been programming for most of my life already at that point, so I read the textbooks and showed up to the groups (the TA for my group was a member of Crusaders[1], which was fun). I think I attended a grand total of two lectures.

I do remember we found a really embarrassing algorithm choice in the Stack class, though (push and pop at the time were O(n), as it used a singly linked list that they iterated through recursively to find the top of the stack... we found that out on a group project where we kept running out stack space because of the recursion...)

[1] https://demozoo.org/groups/12/

NTNU still has at least one course that uses Simula for coursework. TTM4110 - Dependability and Performance with Discrete Event Simulation. An interesting course but without anyone who had real experience with the language teaching it, it was a slog to get through.

That's amazing, thanks for pointing out. Which compiler did you use to run Birtwisle's DEMOS?

I believe we used GNU Cim for the coursework, but it's some years since I took this class personally so I can't say for certain.

Thanks. CIM generates C, so you would have had to run a C compiler too. Was the referenced course material specifically describing DEMOS and Simula as well?

Do you happen to have a PDF of the course material which you could share? I will contact the course admin otherwise.

Yes, CIM is generating C and uses the available C compiler behind the scenes.

Ha, that’s interesting. I used to TA parts of that course; I had to learn Simula and Demos (a simulation library). If I recall correctly it was the first run of the course, and I had to develop some of the labs.