5 Jan
2012
5 Jan
'12
10:52 p.m.
From: Fred Cisin
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 7:54 PM
On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, allison wrote:
> Never used Fortran.
Think of it as an old-style version of BASIC. WRITE
is like PRINTUSING,
with FORMAT being where you specify the print pattern. Any variable whose
name starts with the letters I J K L M or N (alphabetic letters between I
and N (which is the start of "INteger")) is assumed to be an int, unless
you tell it otherwise. Many brands of it require giving a line number to
every line. CALL instead of GOSUB, . . . There are so few differences
that you can list them!
You corrected/clarified the statement regarding "line numbers", but it's
still not correct.
FORTRAN does not have line numbers, it has *statement* numbers, and they
need not be sequential, nor increasing from beginning of program to end.
Certain constructs, such as the DO loop and the FORMAT-driven I/O
statements, *require* statement numbers:
DO 10 I=1,10
WRITE (7,100) I
10 CONTINUE
100 FORMAT (1X,1I3)
Statement numbers occur in the first 5 columns of the input card; a
character other than a space in column 6 marks a card as a continuation
of the preceding statement. Spacing within columns 1-5 is not significant.
> My first language was Darthmuth BASIC on GE
Tymeshare.
I've always assumed that Kurtz and Kemeny's
intent was just to make
getting started in FORTRAN a little easier for beginners.
You don't have to assume. They state as much in the early documents.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/