Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:29:05 +0100, Andy Walker wrote:

People complained about the size of the A68 reports, but that was
before they saw the modern C standards, which still don't define C in
the sort of formality that A68 achieved.

I, too, wondered at the time why more people didn’t feel that the Algol 68
spec was an important step forward in formal language definition.

But then, look at how plain-language descriptions have actually been made
to work over the past few decades: a common strategy is to require the
existence of two independently-created implementations that demonstrate
interoperability from the same spec, as an indication that the spec is
sufficiently clear and free of bugs to be worth finalizing.

We do this not just with programming languages (all the ones in current
use), but with things like file formats and network protocol specs as well
-- look at the “RFC” series of documents from the IETF, for example.