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
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