Re: The joy of FORTRAN

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

On 2024-09-24, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
 

On 24/09/2024 14:11, Sn!pe wrote:
 

No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language?  It was contemporaneous
with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>

 
If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B,  C, and Pascal
and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They
completely replaced it.

 
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).
Oh, and don't forget RPG...
 

FORTRAN became the start of BASIC.
 
COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.

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

Yes, that’s another feature I forgot. I like this style a lot more than C’s
style, it seems more explicit.

 
And in COBOL, if you don't want to write COBOL-style arithmetic expressions,
you can say "COMPUTE" followed by a FORTRAN-style expression.
 

--
Pete