Self modifying code, lambda calculus - Re: ENIAC programming

[Dave G4UGM]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck
> Guzis
> Sent: 21 September 2015 20:29
> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: Self modifying code, lambda calculus - Re: ENIAC programming
> 
> On 09/21/2015 12:18 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
> 
> > A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.
> 
> Conversely, several languages were initially written in FORTRAN--it was
> among the most portable in the early days.   Remember those programs
> that started out with a statement something like this?
> 
> 
> C      FIRST, GET THE CHARACTER SET
> 
>         DIMENSION IALPHA(80)
> 
>         READ 100,IALPHA
> 100    FORMAT (80A1)
> 
> Not everyone spoke USASCII or EBCDIC back in the day--and character
> constants weren't part of most FORTRANs.
> 
> --Chuck

I wrote X.25 software in Fortran:-(. We had some machine specific routines
to allow the Fortran code to wait for a packet to arrive.
There was also a huge vector of strings with matching integer arrays that
allowed them to be chained together, and to have types allocated to them
There were also a large number of "INCLUDE" files with a parameters which
defined the structure of data stored in the character vectors....

Dave