5 Apr
2025
5 Apr
'25
5:08 p.m.
On 4/5/25 07:03, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
I never thought of Fortran of being portable by
design. It may
be fairly portable just because of the simplicity of the language.
I'll let you know, I am about to try moving a program that ran on
TOPS-10 and IBM MTS to Microsoft Fortran-80. :-)
I did something similar some 50 years ago. Took the PDP-10 "Colossal
Cave/Adventure" source to CDC 6000 FORTRAN running under SCOPE.
The part that involved the most labor was conversion of the source code
tape that used the TOPS-10 convention of 5 7-bit ASCII in a 36 bit word
to CDC 6 bit Display code. Conversion of the FORTRAN dialect was fairly
trivial; the most effort involved re-implementing the SAVE command (CDC
SCOPE did not have a simple method for saving core images and restarting
them). The result ran almost from the first try.
The truly portable language was COBOL. :-)
50 years ago, COBOL (and FORTRAN) standardization was a loose affair.
Many smaller systems simply lacked COBOL (was there a 1401 COBOL?).
Language features were removed as the machine architecture dictated.
For example, contrast 1960s IBM S/360 USA "BASIC" FORTRAN with, say
UNIVAC 1108 FORTRAN-V. Going from the small (no logical IF, etc.) IBM
dialect to the UNIVAC one would have been pretty simple; the other
direction, not so much.
I recall that DOS/360 COBOL as released lacked ISAM--the statements
could be compiled, but no code was generated. Instead, IBM provided a
bunch of library routines that were invoked with the "ENTER LINKAGE"
statement.
--Chuck
--Chuck