Re: The joy of FORTRAN

According to Charlie Gibbs  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>:

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.

Somewhat but see below.

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).

That was certainly my experience.

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.

C's data structures came from COBOL via PL/I.  COBOL had (has) very powerful
data structures but weak control structures.

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