On 8 Feb 2010 at 18:42, Andy Holt wrote:
I remember the Algol-FORTRAN cross-pond war of the 60s
and 70s. :)
Now I wonder, "who won?" :)
The easy answer is "C" :-)
The curious thing is that the "structured" languages of the 70s
(Pascal and Modula-2) seem to have regressed to minority languages.
If anything, the language battles taught me that it's possible to
write unintelligible code in *any* language.
But I'd say that FORTRAN probably won the FORTRAN-Algol war in at
least one respect. Most of the nuclear arms race software was done
in it (or in dialects of it, such as LRLTRAN). I do not know what
the Soviets used, but it probably wasn't FORTRAN.
Let's see--the last standard revision to FORTRAN was Fortran 2003;
that to Algol was, what, Algol-68?
--Chuck