31 Mar
2023
31 Mar
'23
2:52 p.m.
On 3/31/23 14:04, Hans-Ulrich Hölscher via cctalk wrote:
Sorry, no - the PDP-10 version apparently did not
survive.
But there's still some PDP-10 specific code contained (commented out) in
the TREK7 sources and I think a backport should be possible.
Unfortunately I'm not good at the PDP-10 and its operating system(s), so I
could only help with my FORTRAN knowledge ...
Ulli
FORTRAN was used for a lot of entertainment software back then. Chess
3.0 most definitely was (CDC FORTRAN), as well as Adventure (PDP-10
FORTRAN). Neither was "straight" FORTRAN IV, as there was no official
(X3.4.3 or X3.9) ban on vendor "extensions"--and vendors went bonkers
extending the language. All one need do is to look in the back of
McCracken's FORTRAN IV book.
That being said, it was certainly possible to write "portable" FORTRAN,
but day-to-day, nobody did. There was no "character" type in F66;
indeed the world was a mixture of 6- and 8-bit "byte" systems--and many
were not byte-addressable. There wasn't even an official collating
sequence, so the only test that could meaningfully be made on an integer
holding a character value was equality or inequality. Read in the
alphabet using 80A1 format and do all your character manipulation by
referring to that.
Numeric FORTRAN benchmarks (i.e. real benchmark code that was used to
qualify a vendor for a given contract) were pretty much the rule.
--Chuck