On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 14:46:28 -0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> declaimed the following:
>On 2021-09-08, charles hottel <chot...@earthlink.net> wrote: > >> So what do yoy think or feel about a language like RATFOR (Rational >> FORTRAN) which was implemented as macros? Should they instead have >> simply adapted themselves to FORTRAN? > >That's an interesting question. If the langauge is complete, >well-defined, and well-documented then it's not that much different >than any other source language than gets translated into a lower level >language (e.g. C -> assembly). My recollection of RATFOR was that it >provided enough signifcant "features" that weren't available in the >underlying FORTRAN to make it worthwhile. > Primarily providing block structured IF/ELSE and loops -- in a language that only really provided IF/GOTO... My college tried using one of these (for some reason the name TextFOR sticks with me)... The experiment only lasted one term. The preprocessor ate CPU and I/O time -- with the result that the FORTRAN class used two or three times the times of the COBOL class! (The native compilers were designed as re-entrant, allowing multiple compiles to share one in-core image; the preprocessor no doubt ran as one image per compile, triggering lots of page swapping to disk) -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfr...@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list