[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

6th edition had fc <http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/fc> but it would not
take a standard F4 (or F2) deck to my knowledge. It may have been in 5th
also.   It was pretty limited.  As I said, I remember one of the arguments
for why not UNIX in the EE Dept was the lack of a 'proper' Fortran
implementation.

I remember an an early attempt at f2c in those days [which I think came
from UMich], but it did not work much better than fc itself as it was a
subset language. FYI: f2c was much later (I want to say 82-83ish and post
f77).  But it was what Ted and I used to start to convert advent to C for
the UNIX, so that was pre V7 and must have been 76ish.

Clem
ᐧ

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 1:39 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 3/19/18, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > arrgh -- dyslexia -- VT-100's are NOT  full ansi [they use the ANSI
> > sequences, but do not implement all of the features/behaviors in the
> > spec].  VMS Fortran started the same way, although it did conform in time
> > because it had to pass the Fortran validation tests.
> >
> 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.
>
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