10 Aug
2012
10 Aug
'12
10:07 a.m.
On 10 Aug 2012 at 10:04, ben wrote:
Back to FORTRAN. At one time utilities for new
hardware (1970's) was
written in FORTRAN to portable. Any idea what machines they expected
the programs to be ran on?
Are you referring to cross-assemblers and the like? There usually
was no expectation of any particular hardware; usually, the only
requirement was that it should use binary. In many of them, the
first card read was one punched with the character set to be used, so
that considerations about character width (i.e. 6 or 8 bits),
collating sequence (e.g. BCD, ASCII or EBCDIC) could be handled.
FORTRAN, as long as you stayed away from vendor extensions, really
could be portable across a much wider range of hardware than that
supported by, say, C.
And if you sold a mainframe, it was a given that FORTRAN was
supported. So the answer to your question is, I suppose, "whatever
you happen to have around".
--Chuck