I agree; AFAIK I was never aware of any link between Fortran and early C
... although if you squint at Ratfor just the right way it looks at times a
little bit like K&R without C-style function declarations and calling
semantics and some of the other frosting... I could see this being the root
of the assumption of the link between the two?
Best,
Sean
On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:
Reading the two referenced links leads me to a
different conclusion:
FORTRAN would not do the job at all, so he started from scratch - almost
immediately.
"Anyway, it took him about a day to realize that he didn't want to do a
Fortran compiler at all. So he did this very simple language called B
and got it going on the PDP-7."
"After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a
language of his own"
(and "rapidly scuttled seems to have been a day).
So I don't agree with the assertion that "'C' started out as a Fortran
compiler". Not at all.
JRJ
On 9/22/2015 3:49 PM, Diane Bruce wrote:
On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 04:35:24PM -0400, Paul
Koning wrote:
>
>> On Sep 22, 2015, at 4:22 PM, Diane Bruce <db at db.net> wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>>> But back in the 60's, every manufacturer had its own variety of
FORTRAN,
>> including (IIRC), UNIVAC's own
"FORTRAN V".
> Ah, yes. I remember WatFor
And Unix was no different, 'C' started out as a Fortran compiler.
Really? "citation needed".
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/expotape.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20030501014008/http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/…