7 May
2010
7 May
'10
8:04 p.m.
I've read this, and the rest of the thread, and
I'm sorry, but subject
to you presenting us with some pretty remarkable evidence, I think
that you don't know what you're talking about.
Apart from some very primitive assembler-style systems, FORTRAN was
the world's first high-level programming language of any kind,
followed some years later by COBOL. FORTRAN's planning dates back to
the early 1950s and it was implemented and running by the late 1950s.
It *had* no significant predecessors in a form that would really be
recognised as a high-level programming language today; before FORTRAN,
the best there was were some coding systems for simplifying the
representation of mathematical or arithmetical operations for input
into the primitive computers of the time.
*You*, Dan, may have first met FORTRAN in the 1970s, and maybe the
systems you were using had a predecessor called Valtrep that virtually
nobody else has ever heard about - but in computer terms, FORTRAN was
already a venerable grey-bearded ancient by then.
Sir, you are wrong. Completely and utterly plain dead wrong.
If you can present evidence that you are not mistaken, then you will
re-write the history of computing and of the development of
programming languages, so I urge you to do so if you can.
I was almost going to say "prove it isn't correct", but I won't.
it's not fair.
But I don't think your statements are "fair" either.
Fortran the first high-level language, I think that would be open to debate.
Indeed, wikipedia says otherwise... and I quote:
The first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalk?l,
developed for the German Z3 by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945.
LISP, COBOL and Algol are also mentioned during the 1950s, so "first" is perhaps
debateable. Do we count the programmable "Looms" ?
There are questions I can't answer at this time. I can just say, from memory, Valtrep
was more "primitive" than Fortran, and yet, very "fortran-like", as I
said, if you could program Fortran, Valtrep would be easy to pick up.
I can't find any information on it, nor can I find any information on the computer
system it ran on (that's bad).
so to be fair, I'll mark this and file it as
"questionable"/"suspect" until some evidence can be shown either way.
Dan.
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