On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:07 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

[...]

I do remember, one of the big issues with UNIX being picked up into the EE department was the lack of a 'proper Fortran.'    As much as modern languages like C and Pascal were clearly the direction, a lot of professors had a lot of code in FORTRAN they wanted to run.

So now I live in a world were the best FORTRAN compilers are UNIX based and I don't write with FORTRAN anymore.   I still have a ton of respect for those that do and even more for the wizards like Paul and co that have spent their careers creating compilers for FORTRAN that have spanned such changes in the underlying system hardware, as well as the language itself and keep those same user codes getting correct answers and using the hardware as well as can be.

First, in Dennis Ritchie's paper, "The Development of the C Language" (https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html) he mentions the early days of Unix, Ken taking Doug McIlroy's implementation of "TMG" on the PDP-7 as a challenge and deciding to produce a "systems programming language." The first effort was, apparently, "a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran", followed by B.

I'm curious at the FORTRAN effort: what was that about, where did it come from, and why was it abandoned?