Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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.