On 03/19/2017 08:04 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > FORTRAN. FORTRAN D (DOS/360), F and G (OS/360), which were FORTRAN > IV compilers (retronamed "Fortran 66"). VAX/VMS Fortran 77, except > most VAXen of the day you seem to be talking about ran BSD Unix and > Fortran was handled by f2c. > > I learned FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1401, a decimal computer, before > moving on to PL/1 and COBOL (and FORTRAN) on the System/360.
There was another FORTRAN 66 available fro the S/360, but you usually saw it on the lower models (25, 30, 40). It was called "Basic FORTRAN IV" or sometimes "USA Basic FORTRAN". There doesn't seem to be a manual in S/360 section for this on bitsavers. I recall that it was a slim little packet. It was brutal--basic INTEGER, REAL and DOUBLE PRECISION data declarations; blank COMMON only; arithmetic IF only, computed and unconditional GO TO--and the bugbear of many programmers: strict enforcement of "mixed mode" prohibitions. File I/O was reasonable, I suppose. A maximum of 6 characters in a variable name, stuff like that. Better than some of the stripped-down FORTRAN II versions, which often didn't even include type declarations. FORTRAN IV was a step forward--vendor "extensions" of FORTRAN II were getting out of hand--contrast some of the conventions of, say, 7090 FMS II/IBSYS fORTRAN with other vendors. For example, punching a 'B" in column 1 indicated a "logical/Boolean" expression and so on... Still, vendors kept extending their FORTRAN IVs. I think I remarked on a CDC syntactic extension that resulted in the ability to write an ambiguous statement, with no clear way to resolve the meaning. I believe that Univac, at one point, boasted an 1100 "FORTRAN V". That's chutzpah for you. "FORTRAN VI", of course, was PL/I. F77 tightened that up and brought out the notion of having to flag any non-ANSI syntax. F90 was clear in that vendor extensions were to be disabled by default; i.e., the user must explicitly enable them. F90 was, to me, the point of departure. Many statement types were deprecated; since the world was no longer coding on cards, free-format input was standardized. Extensions for high-end supercomputers were codified, etc. Reserved words made their appearance--in previous versions, the notion of "whitespace" was introduced. It was perfectly legitimate to name a variable "FORMAT" or "REAL" and write it as "F OR M AT", though I suspect that few ever did. The Fortran of today resembles FORTRAN II in the same way that COBOL 2014 resembles IBM COMTRAN. But, mutatis mutandis, Fortran/FORTRAN still lives. --Chuck