On 18 Mar 2018, at 18:51, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:
I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had
read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its
poorly-behaved grammar.
They probably could not have read it: if I'm right, the draft specification for FORTRAN was 1954, with the manual and an implementation following in October 1956 & April 1957. The Chomsky hierarchy was described by Chomsky in 1956. So they got FORTRAN 'wrong' because no-one knew what 'right' was, or how it differed from 'wrong' at the point they had to decide what the syntax was going to be.