-----Original Message-----
From: cclist at
sydex.com
Sent: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:27:50 -0800
To: cctalk at
classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog
On 8 Feb 2010 at 18:58, somebody wrote:
> Here, here. The thing that impressed me
about FORTRAN (well, as as
> science major, anyway) was that it could do complex numbers as a
> *NATIVE* datatype!! Now, I know for you OOP and C++ guys, custom,
> exotic datatypes are a dime a dozen. But in 1980, I was sure glad I
> could do complex math without all of the extra baggage that would
> have been necessary if I had to use, say, BASIC-Plus.
Consider the vintage of FORTRAN--mainframes did not universally enjoy
computation in binary, much less ones' versus twos' complement.
Character sets were of differing content, collating sequence and
character length. Recursion as a permissable construct did not enter
the language until fairly late (some systems lacked native stack
facilities; the CDC 6000 series, like the PDP-8, simply stored a jump
to the return address at the entry point of a subroutine). I/O
implementation could be wildly different.
Point taken: There is only so much you can do to facilitate
portability when such fundamental differences exist. This
diversity doesn't exist today, and I think we are the worse
for it. I suspect each of those approaches gave their machines
some advantage or suitability for different tasks.
Today, we just throw more MIPS at our one-cpu-fits-all approach.
ANSI X3 committee meetings were more like political
conventions in
some respects. I recall that when vector language features were being
proposed for Fortran 8X (to become Fortran 90), the DEC and IBM
contingent threatened to walk out of the proceedings because the
committee decided not to simply assume IBM VECTRAN as its basis.
Sigh. That's what happens when the focus shifts away from the
science of computing and on to marketing. I'll never deny marketing's
role in making computing accessible to everyone; but I'm holding
it accountable for seriously messing up good ideas and consigning
them to oblivion because they don't think it will sell.
It's really amazing that FORTRAN/Fortran is still
around.
I think maybe that speaks more of the solidity of the earlier
implementations of that language, rather than 'advances' made
since the PC era.
-Jeff
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