Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 21:40:31 +0000, John Levine wrote:

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:22:54 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:
>

COBOL had (has) very powerful data structures ...

>
No pointers, no typedefs, no dynamic arrays, no array lower bounds other
than 1, no parametric types ...

 
It was 1960.  Fortran had arrays of numbers, COBOL had structures
including arrays of structures.  If your point is that we have figured
stuff out in the following 60 years, well, yes, we have.
 
I guess Algol60 had dynamic arrays but no structures which limited how
useful they were.  And the call-by-name mistake made implementation very
painful.

I like Atlas Autocode; pity it never took off. Algol with the difficult
implementation bits removed. But still powerful.

There are, however, a few implementations of Edinburgh IMP (a close
derivative), and that was used for real stuff, albeit in a limited orbit.
In fact, I have just written a compiler for it, although the target system
is unlikely to excite anyone.



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