Re: The joy of FORTRAN

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 24/09/2024 23:36, Peter Flass wrote:

R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:

rbowman wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
 

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language?  It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

 
ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
use.
 

 
ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL".  If I
want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
How well did it handle character strings?  Any language which could not
handle them was a language I wanted no part of.
 

 
C is just pathetic at character strings.
 

Not really.
They are clearly defined entities and you could construct any routines
to manipualate them you liked
 
 

That’s like saying Assembler is great at handling strings. You cam write
routines to do whatever you want.

Another thing PL/I got from COBOL is “natural” string handling. Assign a
short string to a larger any the result is automatically blank-padded.
Assign a longer to a shorter and the longer is truncated, with or without
an error. The lengths are all handled by the compiler, so you never get
overruns. I don’t know what ALGOL does. Burroughs ALGOL-58 didn’t handle
strings well. Maybe ALGOL-60 fixed this.

--
Pete