If you understood the architecture and instruction set of the IBM 709/7090/7094 series (I cut my programming teeth on the 7094), you understood the "quirks" of Fortan: three way branches, indexing arrays in reverse order, always executing a loop at least once, etc. Fortran "tricked" the writer into producing code that worked well on those machines, but was much easier to understand and modify than assembler. Not all that different from C and DEC boxes, but the IBM machines were less coherent.

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 11:29 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
To the author of the first message, the one who called Fortran an "obscenity".

-rob


On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 3:11 PM Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2018-12-02 8:32 PM, Rob Pike wrote:
> Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by today's ideas about language design.

The 1977 lecture was by John Backus, not me, so I'm confused who that's
directed at.

>
> -rob
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au
> <mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
>
>     On 2018-12-02 5:17 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>     > As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in
>     > 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax (he is the "B"), but he also gave us
>     > that FORTRAN obscenity...  Yeah, it was a nice language at the
>     time; the
>     > engineers loved it, but tthe computer scientists hated it (have
>     you ever
>     > tried to debug a FORTRAN program that somebody else wrote?).
>
>     He made amends by being early to recognise that problem, and propose
>     solutions, in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture (still perfectly
>     relevant today):
>
>     https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
>
>     --Toby
>
>
>
>     >
>     > Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any
>     syntax; it
>     > is completely ad-hoc.
>     >
>     > -- Dave
>     >
>