Talk:S-algol

First orthogonally persitant?

It seems unlikely that PS-algol was the first orthogonally persistent language. MUMPS is orthogonally persistent, and has been in use since the late 1960s, over ten years longer than PS-algol. Unless it is claimed that early versions of MUMPS lacked the persistence feature? I don't know, but I would be surprised if that were the case as it is such a fundamental feature of MUMPS. -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 06:36, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have deleted this part and uncommented:

"It is considered^{[citation needed]} to be the first programming language to support orthogonal persistence. -- Sure about this? Didn't Lisp/Smalltalk provide image-based persistence long before? --"

MATHLAB (1964) also has persistance, so many languages have has this feature prior to S-algol. Macaldo (talk) 20:26, 4 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that the claim is not that PS-algol in the first language to support persistence but to support "orthogonal persistence" - that is persistence where the programmer can treat any data type the same irrespective of the lifetime of the data. The language therefore supports making procedures, and complex data structures with sharing, outlive the program that created them. Bizlib247 (talk) 12:30, 22 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

MUMPS certainly supports persistence. It does not have "orthogonal persistence", as defined by Malcolm Atkinson in 1978 as in MUMPS the distinction between data that is temporary and data that persists after a program terminates is explicit in the program. Perhaps it would be better to clarify that orthogonal persistence generalised the persistence features from existing languages. Bizlib247 (talk) 12:42, 22 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]