21 Mar
2007
21 Mar
'07
5:17 p.m.
Did any
computer built after 1960 NOT have a FORTRAN implementation?
Yes, my ICT1301 (155+ built from 1962 to 1965) had no Fortran compiler. I seem to remember that some of the people who taught
me to program
considered Fortran to be too close to the 7094 instruction set, in
particular
they said the computed goto mapped directly onto a 7094 instruction and
hence considered it to be not very universal, and to support it would
be to
assist IBM in its domination of the computer market.
THe story I heard was that as computer time was so expensive back then
(while human programmer time was relatively cheap), had the Fortran
compiler not gernerated code that was as efficient as a reasonable
programmer's hand-genearted code then nobody would use Fortran.
Making the Fortran language clsoe to the target machine's instruction set
would certainly make it wasier for a relatively simple compiler to
generate efficient code.
-tony