14 Jan
2025
14 Jan
'25
4:32 p.m.
On 1/14/25 15:31, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
F90 was an extension to F77 and was entirely upwardly
compatible with
it, not an entirely new language.
IMOHO, the most significant revision of the F77 standard by F90 was
that is was acceptable to spell the last 6 letters of the language in
lower case. (i.e. Fortran). In a way, that broke with the historical
sense of the name. It should have been ForTran.
(just kidding)
F66 was important in a way, as vendor extensions had gone a bit wild.
(e.g. punch a B in column 1 and the arithmetic operators become boolean.
I think that was a feature in 7090 FMS/IBSYS).
One defining characteristic of post-1980 languages was the assumption of
a binary radix, as opposed to systems like the 1401 or 7070, which were
decimal and lacked bitwise boolean operations.
--Chuck