[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

Tony Finch dot at dotat.at
Tue Dec 4 21:53:14 AEST 2018


Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Fortran2018 (which was release just last week BTW) is hardly the language I
> learned in the early 1970s (Fortran-IV) or my father a dozen or so years
> previous to me.

One of the more obscure books I have is about "the F programming language"
http://www.fortran.com/F/ which is the modern subset of Fortran 95. A
curious thing about F is that it doesn't include DO WHILE; my
understanding is that there was a faction of the Fortran standardization
committee which was firmly against WHILE, and that was the faction that
defined the F subset.

I can't now find any information about this argument / controversy, but my
link archive includes https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=800168.811545
Brenda Baker's paper on converting Fortran IV programs to ratfor.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/
Irish Sea: Southwest 5, backing east, then becoming cyclonic later, 5 to 7,
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