5 Apr
2025
5 Apr
'25
5:44 a.m.
On 4/4/25 20:15, ben via cctalk wrote:
I thought FORTRAN IV was the portable programing
language.
They have talked about having smarter high level programing languages
for years. Has that gotten anywhere?
Back in the heyday of FORTRAN, the universe of architectures was a lot
more diverse and foreign to languages such as C. Non-binary (decimal)
numeric representations, Binary ones' complement math, vendor-unique
character sets (it's why FORTRAN (and COBOL) is written using a very
small common character set)--and lack of character-handling operations,
as well as Boolean functions.
I think that the original PALASM was written in "portable" FORTRAN. One
of the more common ways to start a "portable" program was to READ a card
with the character set punched onto it in A1 format. You manipulated
characters by referring to their positions in the alpha A1 array.
--Chuck