Glyn Astill wrote:

> How you manage to compare slonik scripts to fortran is beyond me,
> and from that comment I can only guess you've never touched any form of assembly.

Ha, boy you guessed wrong on that one.  I started programming IBM360 assembly on 80-column punch cards in 1969, when there were only two IBM computers in the entire County of Santa Cruz, CA.  I wrote my own assembler (most of you have probably never even run an assembler, you only know about compilers!) in Algol on a Burroughs B6700 at UC Davis in 1975, because the assembler Intel gave us was too slow and crashed.  It compiled 8080 assembly into object that was download from the B6700 to an Intel CPU through a 110 BAUD paper-tape punch teletype.  I wrote tens of thousands of lines of Motorola 6800 and Motorola 68000 assembly code in the early 1980's for high-performance chemistry instruments.

I programmed in FORTRAN II (have you even heard of FORTRAN II?), FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN 77, and various other flavors, not to mention a half-dozen languages that went obsolete before many of you guys were even born, literally.

Thankfully, those days are over.  The trick in life is to keep educating yourself!

These days, I program in high-level languages like Java and Perl.  Why should programmers waste their time doing stuff that the computer can do?  Like creating Slony's configuration files?

Craig