Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North America
Algol was generally considered the domain of computer science weenies,
while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications in the Real World
[tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).

It didn’t help that Algol-60 had nothing resembling standardized I/O
facilities, whereas these were an integral feature of both Fortran and
COBOL.

This was remedied later in Algol-68, at the cost of adding a lot of
complexity.

This was in the days before POSIX, of course, when every computer system
seemed to do I/O entirely differently. Most of those, um, idiosyncrasies,
have thankfully evaporated.

So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.