On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Dan Stromberg wrote: Dunno; I taught myself FORTRAN-II after winning a book at school (yes, really!), and somehow ploughed through WATFOR (urk!) and WATFIV (a bit better) in my early CompSci classes, then was allowed to use FORTRAN-G in later on. And if we promised to behave ourselves i.e. debug the program on FORTRAN-G first then we were allowed to use FORTRAN-H (which needed a special code on the JOB card, as I recall). Never used the abomination since... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote: I forgot to mention that the other book I won (apparently I topped my school in Science or something, and could pick two books from a list) was "Business Data Processing", so I taught myself simple COBOL :-) I lost both books in a house move, alas... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 05:06:51PM +0000, Steve Simon wrote: Never heard of a French version of Fortran, but you may have been confused with LSE (Langage Symbolique d'Enseignement, aka Symbolic Language for Education), which was a BASIC variant with French keywords. Kind of weird, never used it, but it was popular in the 1970s in France. English Wikipeda page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(programming_language) More complete French Wikipedia page: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(langage) Pierre

again, a personal view, i think fortran 66 was not a great language but by the time 77 came around it was good enough (especially with rat4 in front) the problem fortran had was its position in time, in the early days of computer programming the authors of some large systems tended to be experts in their fields, but not always good programmers. in previous jobs i supported both Pafec FE and Flow3d. both of these started out as well structured systems but where amended by many hackers. fortran gets the blame for this because fortran was what people used then, but its not the languages fault. -Steve

On 03/17/2018 09:43 AM, Clem Cole wrote:> As something sorta, kinda like a proof by contradiction, I work in an RF lab. A fair amount of effort is put into writing code to control lab gear to automate data collection, reach confidence level, etc. For one project the customer required that it be written in Java. Most RF lab gear and radios use I/Q (in-phase/quadrature) signals and the associated math is complex. Try doing complex DSP in Java and you will soon sing the praises of Fortran where it's a snap. :-) Mike Markowski

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:51 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote: Right .. my point was it is easy to trash talk something that was remarkably successful such as FORTRAN when it was created (60 years) later​ ​when we get to look back on the design with a great deal more knowledge that original designers had creating it​. To be honest, I have a hard time imagining writing some of the programs my late father did when he was a 'computer' in the later 50s and early 60s and he and his peeps started to convert their work from manual equation grinding to computer simulation ( *i.e.* the movie Hidden Figures). As importantly, it was just those old codes that made the market to allowed computers to become valuable. Remember that the original estimates in the 1940-50s was a tens of systems world wide. FORTRAN was really the key enabler that made market and created the need for more computers. Again, we can not judge with today's lens if for no other reason than because so much of what we have in computing (just the space and speed of the systems alone) were unimaginable in the 50s & 60s. Computer time was much more expensive/too precious. I'm not sure my adult aged children or most of their friends have ever used systems were 'accounting' was done and 'charge back' was performed, number of seconds of CPU time was calculated. [IIRC: The student WatFIV compiler at CMU on TSS/360 gave you no more than 10 seconds of compile time and 2.5 seconds of run time for your batch job]. Today we have IDE's, and interactive debuggers etc... such were just not cost effective. The key point being that computers cost more than people. To bring this back to UNIX. That was one of the really remarkable things about Ken and Dennis work. Interactive systems like UNIX were not the norm. Yes, DEC sold them and they were are hit for only a small group, but even TOPS-10 systems were out of reach for many (remember K&D had their PDP-10 proposal tossed out by their management]. Unix ran on 'modest' hardware and that changed a lot of things. And I think that is one of the reasons why Fortran was 'knocked' out of its position with many programmers. Interactive computing changed who was using computers. But as Paul mentioned, Fortran had already become the linga-franc of the scientific community before we were able to use computers as we do today. As I said, the math they used has not changed and it is remarkable that that old 1960's code still works. Steve put it well and I'll add a challenge to any hot shot programmer (which at one time I guess I considered myself to be) to have done much better (I'm sure I could not have). I am humbled by how good a job they did with creating both the language itself, the codes that used it, and how long/well those codes have stood the test of time. I was introduced at FORTRAN-IV, after learning Assembler and BASIC and learned Algol-W at the same time. At the time, I was pretty impressed, with F4, some of its strangeness like white space, or column orientation were not that strange given we all were on cards. But I was lucky to be at a place were interactive computing was also blossoming and was given all the computer I wanted on PDP-10s and PDP-11s. I stopped writing FORTRAN because we had SAIL, BLISS and eventually C and Pascal. Although thinking back, the last large Fortran program I wrote for CMU was an accounting program for the PDP-20's in '76 that computer center had. I'm not sure why they wanted it in Fortran, but I do remember that was a requirement, probably because it had to run TSS also. 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. So I never knock FORTRAN or FORTRAN programmers. While we may not chose to use it because it is the wrong tool for our job, they have done and continue to do much for all of us and we all should really remember that. Clem ᐧ

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: ​I'll let Ken, Steve or Doug answer definitively that​ but I would suspect - it is a lot of work and at time t0, it was less valuable than some of the other efforts going at the time. ​Mumble, although probably true in absolute fact. The DEC VAX/VMS Fortran compiler was contemporary. I have always said that the best piece of work DEC Marketing ever did was convince the world that VMS Fortran was F77 (it was not). It ended up being a super-set, although it did not start out that way (similar to people believing VT-100's are ANSI - they are and in that case never did fully conform). ​I used the PCC/VAX version extensively (as well as ratfor) for the 'users space' part of my thesis work. My housemate, Tom Quarles, had developed SPICE3 (in C) and Ellis Cohen had written SPICE2 in FORTRAN. FPS had done a great deal of development on the array processor that was the basis for my work, all in Ratfor but assuming VMS under the coveres (they wrote an optimizing parallel Fortran compiler in same -- those guys are now the Portland Compiler Group).​ ​I worked, although moving stuff from VMS to BSD was huge because F77 != VMS Fortran. Much of the 'grunt' work I had was making all that work.​ In fact, it was this work that I found a bug in the C compiler runtimes, that I have written about elsewhere. The ratfor code called F77, which shared C's runtime. ᐧ

On 3/19/18, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: VAX/VMS Fortran was under development at the same time as the Fortran-77 standard. For the VMS Fortran development team, the new F77 features weren't a particularly high priority at the time because there wasn't any existing code that used them, whereas there was a ton of dusty-deck IBM FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV code out there, especially in the educational market DEC was keenest to sell the VAX into. F77 features were implemented over time in VAX/VMS Fortran, and after a couple of releases it was fully Fortran-77 compliant. But at first release in 1978 it was an extended subset of F77. Was f77 the first Fortran for UNIX, or were there other compilers for Fortran before f77 came along? -Paul W.

On Mon, 19 Mar 2018, George Michaelson wrote: XD That's the only Fortran program that matters to me. ;) -uso.

One reason VAX Fortran was so popular is because DEC often included it in quotes for Vaxes. If you were writing software in a high-level language on VMS back then, writing it in Fortran was a good bet since almost all Vaxes running VMS had Vax Fortran. It took a while before the VAX C compiler was good enough, and even then, it wasn't cheap. I was in the VMS development group at Sybase in the early 1990s and we often hit issues in VAX C, and in the VAX Debug support for it. Back to Unix ... Jon Forrest

On 3/19/2018 2:40 PM, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS wrote: I had a chance to try compiling a heavily-pthread'd queuing system I wrote, using VAX C on VMS 6.0+, actually running it on a VAXSTATION-3200. I originally developed it on Sun Solaris, but with minimal compatibility issues, also ran on HP/UX, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. It compiled on the VAX cleanly, needed some FIONBIO ioctl's (like FreeBSD) and ran suprisingly well for what it was. A 10Mbps NIC could only get so much data forced through it. It could handle a few thousand threads before it became unusable, IIRC. Good times. ak

Here is the FORTRAN story as I remember it. At Bell Labs, during the 7094 days a lot of code was written with FAP macros.   I remember a LISP compiler that could go 150 levels deep.  There was an excellent simulation package for filters that was all assembler and macros. When we switched to the GE (later Honeywell), all that work was lost.   It was very painful, and a majority of people swore "never again" and switched to FORTRAN.  A symbolic algebra program in assembler, ALPACK, was slowly recreated in FORTRAN by a team of about five of us.  That was the first time I worked with Dennis, who was able to make a dynamic storage allocator and support recursive calling in FORTRAN, a tour de force.  We were acutely aware that not all FORTRAN compilers were compatible, and Barbara Ryder wrote a PFORT, a program that validated that our programs fell into the subset of FORTRAN that actually worked on the six major manufacturers' FORTRANs.  PFORT was one of the inspirations for Lint.  Many of the differences were completely bizarre -- one FORTRAN would abort if you began a program with more than fifty comment lines... At the time, the main computing center was actually run by the Research department, using a kludged-up OS on the GE--one that had originally been intended to run the much-delayed Multics.    When they finally set up a separate computing dept., I was asked to move over for a couple of years to make sure things went well.   I found that I needed to write some service programs for the GE, and didn't want to learn assembly language.  By this time, Dennis had B running on the PDP-11, and I suggested he port it to the GE.   He said the sentence that changed my life -- "Why don't you do it.  After all, it's just a program!".   B was well suited to the GE, being a word-addressed machine.and soon I was adding features such as a way to make character constants for the GE's 6-bit character set.  And I added the ability to call FORTRAN programs, with a FORTRAN keyword.  (Though it would have been useful, FORTRAN calling B was tricky because of the need to set up the stack...) So the point is, FORTRAN was dominant at Bell Labs for most of the time that C was being developed.  There was a group that was pushing the adoption of PL/1, being used to code Multics, but the compiler was late and not very good and it never really caught on.  The GE compiler was one of the three that I abstracted the machine independent code from for PCC (the other two were PDP-11 and IBM 360). Stu Feldman decided to do F77 -- I'm not sure what his motivation was, but there were a number of compelling ones available.  We talked about what would be needed in the code generator and it wasn't much.   F77 pretty much used the C calling sequence and runtime library, with added functions to do format statements, etc.  And knowing Stu, it was as close to the standard as he could make it. Fast forward a few years.   Unix and C were widely used in the Labs, and while FORTRAN was still important for heavy numerical work, it was waning in popularity.  I had accepted a job in development, being in charge of System V languages -- C, Pascal, FORTRAN,Ada, and later the first commercial C++ compiler..  It was obvious that F77 was losing business bigtime to DEC VMS because their FORTRAN was better.  In particular, the VMS programs ran faster.  So I put together a small team of some of my best people to write a FORTRAN optimizer. That project was very difficult to save -- every six weeks or so, people would look at it, decide FORTRAN was passe, and cut it out of the budget.  I would go to the mat and insist that it was important and get it put back in.   We almost put entries in our calendars every six weeks -- time to save FORTAN again.  The AT&T marketing department treated languages as completely unimportant, and kept assigning their newest hire to interface with me.  I had the same meeting every month for a half-year or more, each with a different newbie with no idea what a computer language was.   By 1986 it became clear to me that I loved development but that AT&T was never going to make it in the computer business.  I accepted a job in California at a startup.  Less than a month after I left, the FORTRAN optimizer (by now almost ready to ship) was cancelled.   A couple of months later, it was revived and finally went to market. I'm told that six months after that it was the best selling language product... Steve

Another bit of history of Fortran on UNIX: DEC initially offered f77 on Ultrix, its commercial UNIX release for the VAX. When the decision to market Ultrix was made, our engineering group, which developed the compiler and software development tools suite for VAX/VMS, offered to port some of our products, including VAX Fortran, to Ultrix. The Ultrix engineering group fought the proposal tooth and nail, and so we dropped the idea. f77 was never taken very seriously by the Fortran user community, whereas VAX Fortran was considered the gold standard for the language. There were repeated calls from potential Ultrix customers for DEC to make VAX Fortran available on that platform. Eventually circa 1985 there was a panic rush project to port VAX Fortran to Ultrix. It was decided that, if we were to meet the short time-to-market goal, modifying the VAX Fortran code generator to emit zmagic object files was out of the question. Instead, we would have it continue to produce VMS object files, and we would port the VMS linker to Ultrix and teach it to understand zmagic, stab-style debug information, and ar archives. I led the team that produced the lk linker, which could take in either zmagic or VAX object files and produced a.out-style images. lk didn't implement some of the esoteric features of ld, but it got the job done. The Fortran RTL was shipped as VMS-style object files. One feature of VMS object files is that the name of the compiler that produced them is recorded. The lk linker reported this in the link maps it produced. VAX Fortran for Ultrix customers were rather surprised to see the variety of languages (BLISS, Pascal, BASIC, Fortran, assembler, etc.) that had been used to implement the Fortran RTL. -Paul W.

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 09:58:48AM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote: Isn't it amusing (aka depressing) how some stuff has to be crammed down people's throats?

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, but its character handling was awful. I ended up writing almost all that stuff in assembler (which fortunately the PDP-11 is wonderful for).

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote: With care, and the right additional pseudo-primitives, you can do quite interesting systems-programming-like things in Fortran. But they are usually a variation on RATFOR and often involve more pain than would otherwise have been needed, but it's possible. I once did some low-level systems stuff in FORTRAN-66 that lived under a psuedo Fortran 77 pre-processor that had some CPP-like macro features.... And I will never, ever, do it again :). I might do Turbo-PASCAL again, but no system's programming in Fortran. Warner

recall what extensions it had to make that practical. Prime was the company that tried to trademark English as the name of their programming language, wasn't it?

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: ​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. ​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. Clem​ ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

On Mar 20, 2018, at 2:36 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: True re TOPS-10. The TOP-10 Pascal compiler was ported from the one for CDC-6000 (authors: Urs Amman, Kesav Nori and may be others). The CDC version was what was described in the Pascal User Manual and Report by Jensen and Wirth. IIRC, someone at Purdue was maintaining it. I knew it well as I had added formatted IO for scalars, sets & a few more things that I forget now + I was studying it with an aim to write my own compiler. I believe this was the port: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220846309_A_pascal_compiler_bootst… [Even the portable "P4" Pascal compiler must've been derived from the same original code as I recognize its code shape and random stuff like variable names etc. p4 sources are online but I don't see the tops-10 ones]

BasicPlus was about the only good thing about RSTS. In fact, we were allowed to replace the RSTS with UNIX at JHU if we could get BASIC PLUS ported over. Fortunately, RSTS used EMT instructions for system calls (bizarre if you read the PDP-11 Processor Handbook) where as UNIX used the expected TRAP instruction. All we had to do was add a "nostack" system call (I think we put it in, it might have already been there) to disable UNIX's idea of how a stack should work.

I had an interesting run-in with FORTRAN's blank treatment very early in my career.   A couple of weeks after I graduated from college I had a summer job at Bell Labs.  I was given a job to program a state minimization algorithm -- they expected it to take me the whole summer.  A couple of days after arriving, i heard about a new language, SNOBOL, developed at another location at Bell Labs.  This sounded like the perfect language to write my program in, so I got a copy to use (I think I was the first user at Murray Hill). Now, in those days, there were rooms full of "keypunch girls" (sic) whose job was to punch up our programs (written on coding sheets) and verify them and give us the deck back.  The vast majority of jobs they encountered were FORTRAN, and to avoid ambiguity they simply skipped all blanks.   (it wasn't quite that easy -- they knew about column 7 and hollerith strings).  But any blanks that we wanted on the cards had to be explicitly indicated on the coding sheet. Of course, SNOBOL had what we would consider now a more modern syntax with blanks significant and nothing magic about columns 6 or 7...    So when I gave them my first 2-page SNOBOL program, they typed everything on each line starting in column 7 and with all blanks removed.    For some reason, the first couple of cards looked OK to me, so I submitted the deck, and proceeded to get a thick printout that I think enumerated every error message the compiler could produce. I started indicating my blanks carefully but their habit persisted, and almost any nontrivial job  I gave them had errors, either because I hadn't inidicated a blank or they hadn't typed it when I indicated it. Since I had been punching cards myself for a couple of years at college, and when working 2nd shift (when turnaround was much better) there were no keypunchers available, after a couple of weeks I got them to agree to let me keypunch my own programs.  A few years later, the keypunchers were gone, having been rendered obsolete by time sharing and online editing... Oh, and I got the job done in 3 weeks once I got SNOBOL to work...   It really was the right language for the job... Steve PS:  For years afterwards, when I punched in FORTRAN programs I left out all the blanks.  It wasn't until  I worked on a large program with several other people that I was forced to change this habit, my coworkers having threatened me with death or dismemberment if I didn't...