[TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-08-13 19:24, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
>> A little Googling shows that the IF I mentioned was called the
>> "arithmetic IF".
> Ah yes.  It was in FORTRAN II, as I recall.

Still there in FORTRAN 77.

>>  There was also a Computed GOTO that branched to one of N labels
>> depending on the value of the expression.
> I think that was still in FORTRAN IV?

Still there in FORTRAN 77.

>>  And an Assigned GOTO whose main use, as I remember, was to allow for
>> error recovery when a subroutine failed...
> A real ugly statement; you assigned a statement number to a variable, then
> did a sort of indirect GOTO (or did the compiler recognise "GOTO I")?

The compiler recognize "GOTO I". And I have to be assigned to a 
statement number (label). It has to be an integer variable, and when you 
assign it to a label, you cannot do any arithmetic with it anymore. And 
you assign it with a special statement. Thus, it can be used to store 
what label to jump to, but you cannot use arithmetic to set what it 
should jump to.

> How those poor devils ever debugged their code with such monstrous
> constructions I'll never know.

It's actually not that hard. All this stuff is fairly simple to deal 
with. The real horror in FORTRAN is EQUIVALENCE, which can give C a fair 
fight for real horror stories.

But of course, bad programmers can mess things up beyond belief in any 
language.

(And I never went beyond FORTRAN 77, so I don't know how current 
versions look like. I stayed with PDP-11s (well, still do), and nothing 
newer than FORTRAN 77 exists there. :-) )

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol