Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 27/02/2025 02:14, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:17:51 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
 

c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:

On 2/25/25 2:33 PM, vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com wrote:

I went from DEC20 FORTRAN to pdp11 Basic (it had matrix math) to DEC
SAIL (Algol) to Pascal to C to Python

>
   Sounds familiar ... though 'C' became available on the PDP-11s (was
   writ on them). Still pref Pascal over Python where possible.
>

Assembler and COBOL were needed but avoided

>
   Better ASM than COBOL

>
Depends on what you want to do. Assembler is a lot more fun, but I
wouldn’t want to write a payroll system in it.

 I recall one project that used a macroassembler to create sort of a subset
of C. My reaction was 'Okay, but why?'.  I suppose it made sense in an era
when people felt compelled to write their own editors. Or, Gods forbid,
they learned enough about lex and yacc to be really dangerous.
 

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.
--
"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics."
Josef Stalin