Rich kids are into COBOL

[Chuck Guzis]

On 02/17/2015 02:39 PM, ben wrote:

> Was FORTRAN portable or did most jobs fit only the large mainframes at
> the time?

Actually, it was entirely possible to write portable programs in any 
FORTRAN IV or later system.  Note that this included *DECIMAL* machines 
as well as non-ASCII, non-byte addressable machines.  As far as I know, 
C doesn't exist for decimal machines.

Somewhere, I've got a Pascal compiler written in FORTRAN.

It was very usual on non-number-crunching portable programs to see:

     INTEGER ICSET(80)
     COMMON /CHARSET/ ICSET

     READ 100, ICSET
100 FORMAT( 80A1)

Or something similar.  The purpose is to get the basic character set 
defined that you'll be using, so the first input card would have the 
letters and numbers of the character set in a particular order.

--Chuck