Who is the world's oldest working programmer?

On 09/29/2014 10:25 AM, Mouse wrote: To be fair, there was some wisdom in that. Algol had block structuring of a sort; FORTRAN had a widely-known concise and minimalist way of expressing mathematical operations (for quite a long time ACM CALGO would accept submissions in either Algol or FORTRAN); COBOL had a way of representing data structures and numeric precision. And all were mutually incompatible. Obviously, it would have been a real advantage to have a common lingua franca for these competing schools. When forced to use PL/I, the result, of course, was that the Algol people wrote in an Algol style, the FORTRAN people wrote in a FORTRAN style and the COBOL people wrote in a COBOL style. So there was never a common school of programming thought. That's not to say that PL/I didn't have its advantages. It had a very powerful preprocessor language--something that C never had, although C++ sort of comes close. When pared down, it could be quite useful--Intel's PL/M is nothing more than PL/I after a meat cleaver's done with it. DRI offered an amazingly rich version of pared-down PL/I for the 8080-family of microprocessors--it must have been a Herculean effort. --Chuck