Console Generations

[bbcmicro]

I know theres a few gamers on this forum, so I'll ask here.
My friend is a pretty avid gamer, we were discussing consoles and the dreamcast came up. I thought it was a 6th generation console but he seemed adamant that it was what he referred to as '5.5' - Perhaps because it was a couple of years before the main contenders in the 6th generation market.
OK, It's bad enough that we spend out time talking about stuff like that but I said that I was pretty sure consoles weren't grouped into inbetweens, but he wasn't convinced.
I can't find a reference to this and I was wondering if anyone did group consoles this way, my friend isn't usually wrong with consoles and this is nagging me a little.

[atari2600a]

DC was meant to compete w/ the PSX/Xbox/GCN. (Of course it phailed though)

[bbcmicro]

Yes I know, doesn't really answer the question though :eek:

[atari2600a]

Wikipedia says 6th generation.

[bbcmicro]

Ahah, but wikipedia has been known to tell horrible lies!
OK, I'll accept 6th generation. I was right all along! I have prepared a short victory dance for my friend. Ta muchly.

[atari2600a]

Wikipedia is pretty accurate in my opinion, at least for a page the general public would access. Just recently I checked the history on the "banned episodes of Pokemon" wiki, & even it gets changed every few days, so something like the Dreamcast should be pretty accurate.

[carlsson]

The speak of generations tends to be a bit fuzzy anyway. Not always are two systems released in the same year directly comparable, and sometimes a machine from the former generation still is competitive vs the newest system from a different manufacturer.

[Terry Yager]

Not to veer too far off-topic, in the off-topic forum, but, what about programming languages? F'r instance, how accurate is this assessment?

1GL - 1st Generation Language (Machine language)
2GL - 2nd Generation Language Assembler and other low-level languages
3GL - Third Generation Languages (Pascal, C++, QBasic, etc.)
4GL - Fourth Generation Language (Java, HotMetal, Page Mill, etc. - visual languages)

--T

[atari2600a]

I think PASCAL would be closer to ASM-era than C, or C++ for that matter...

[carlsson]

In terms of abstraction and restrictions what you are allowed to do, Pascal is probably a higher level than C and C++. More than once I have heard C described as a glorified assembler, which is not fully accurate.

In terms of how long ago each language was developed, the list would be slightly different. Also one needs to consider programming pragmatics (?) such as object orientation (C++, Java, Smalltalk etc), functional programming (Lisp, Scheme, Erlang etc), logic programming (Prolog) and so on. I think the latest is algorithmic programming or something like that, when you set up algorithms to generate data on the fly instead of having preloaded textures etc. IIRC programming the Cell processor used in the PS3 (?) works like this.

To me, I have never made much distinction between machine language and assembly language. The latter is a 1:1 abstraction where we give each instruction a human readable name, choose to represent numbers as we wish and in source code introduce labels and macros to make it more readable. There is no interpretation or compilation of assembly language, just translating symbols to numbers. I'm wondering which other low-level languages would belong there. Forth comes to my mind, although it is of a higher level of abstraction than assembly.

Here I'd like to include a link to a project to get Forth on the Gameboy, but alas I can't find the project homepage. Google only turns up a lot of irrelevant links, which suggests that the web page in question is no longer available.