[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Having worked on system programming for UNIX and a few of the PDP-11 DEC
> OS’s (DOS, RT, RSX, and in passing RSTS), I can tell you Fortran was
> abhorrent.
>
> Sure it was the only high-level language I had on the RT and RSX systems,
>
​And that was the problem... DEC did not market good tools besides
assembler and FTN for RT and RSX.   3rd parties like Oregon SW and
Whitesmiths' eventually produced good Pascal and C implementation
respectfully.   But, like you, most people I knew, and in my own
experience; nothing but asm and FTN was there.

Paul can correct me, but I don't think DEC even developed a Pascal for TOPS
originally - IIRC the one I used came from the universities.   I think the
first Pascal sold was targeted for the VAX.  Also, RT11 and RSX were
'laboratory' systems and those systems were dominated by Fortran back in
the day - so DEC marketing thought in those terms.

I remember that CMU's Mellon Institute built an automated realtime
newspaper sorting/delivery system for the Pittsburgh Press and a number of
other newspapers and ended up using FORTRAN - because that's all they had
for RT11 that they trusted (thankfully that project started after I had
left, although I helped with the bidding and assessment). We had wanted to
use BLISS but that meant cross compiling from the 10's and the customer
wanted the system self hosting as I recall. By the time the Mellon folks
completed the project, OMSI's Pascal compiler for RT11 was available, but
the water was under the bridge.



> but its character handling was awful.
>
​Yep - but as others have pointed out, with something like RATFOR it could
be made usable and that's what a lot of people I know did when they had
too.   As I said, the FPS folks wrote a parallelizing, Fortran for the
FPS-164 in Ratfor A compiler, to me, is the definition if a character based
application if I can name one.




>   I ended up writing almost all that stuff in assembler
> ​ ​
> (which fortunately the PDP-11 is wonderful for).
>
> ​You and many others ;-)

Clem​
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