Re: ALTER, ASSIGN and labels-as-values

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 3 Jun 2024 10:33:32 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:
 

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

On Thu, 30 May 2024 10:15:54 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>

This was using hand-punched cards, writing FORTRAN 2 code with the
Hollerith text constants so you had to count very carefully:
>
      FORMAT 27HTHIS IS A VERY LONG TEXT STRING...

>
Hey, did you not notice the columns were numbered? So all you had to do
to determine the length of the string was subtract column numbers?
>

Hey, did you not read what I wrote about this being hand-punched cards?
By the time I got to the end of the string it was too late to go back
and update the 27H count.

 Card-punch machines had an option for that too, didn’t they? Certainly the
IBM 129 that I used could do that: copy the card to a new card, up to but
not including the incorrect part, then enter the correction, then copy the
rest of the card.

I did use that mechanism to fix smaller programming mistakes, but for the basic Hollerith counting I pretty much had to get it right the first time, otherwise I had a 4-hour latency before getting the printout back so it could tell me I had a counting error.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"