Re: The joy of FORTRAN

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:43:51 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

When all you had was Macro assembler, writing a good library of Macros
gave you almost a high level language, except it wasn't portable.
 
C *was* portable, mostly.
 
And it was faster to write than Macros assembler. It was really a no
brainer.

 
Sadly, macros made their way into C. The basic idea was fine but we had
one programmer who laid awake nights thinking up new perverted things to
do with macros. I forget if it was Kernighan or Ritchie who later said if
they had only known what people would do with them...
 
C++ doubled down with inline functions.
 

Imported one C program that was all macros. In hindsight it would have been
better just to rewrite it.

--
Pete