Re: The joy of FORTRAN

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
 

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”.

 
My C++ programs NEVER exhibit surprise! (Well, almost never :-D)
 
I did a little bit of Algol the first couple years of college, using an
acoustic modem to access some mainframe in Kansas City.
 
Then they got a PDP machine, and I learned how to use RUNOFF. Typing in ALL
CAPS.
 
Did a fair amount of FORTRAN, too, include programming a lab system to run
experiments, in grad school.
 

PL/I can surprise you because the language is so powerful. A lot of things
that other languages can’t do are handled by PL/I, but if you’re not aware
of the rules for stuff like data conversion the results might not be what
you expect. I still get bitten occasionally, and am left scratching my
head.

--
Pete