On Fri, Oct 24, 2008, Scott Silva wrote: ...
When I learned Fortran IV in 1980 my teacher said that Fortran and Cobol were the languages of the future!
In a presentation at the 1985 Usenix conference, Rob Pike made a comment that he didn't know what the language for scientific program of the future would be, but that it would be called FORTRAN.
COBOL on Burroughs Medium Systems was an extremely powerful language. I wrote some pretty large commerical systems with it. My main problems with COBOL came when I had to run on a system other than Burroughs where COBOL was not fully recursive, and missing features that I took for granted.
My first exposure to computers was in 1966 on a Bendix G-20 and their Mishewaka FORTRAN. This version of FORTRAN was written by engineers, and had features that were well ahead of IBM's FORTRAN:
+ Everything was done in floating point -- engineers don't grok integers.
+ ``DO'' loops would of course have floating point variables, and worked as an engineer or mathematician would expect.
+ ``DO'' loops tested at the top of the loop instead of at the end as they did on IBM FORTRAN. Thus if the starting value was greater than the terminating value nothing in the loop would be executed.
+ Free form input from cards (e.g. one could have ``PI=3.14159'' and it would do the reasonable thing.
+ Free form output.
Bill