[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dave Horsfall]

We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other 
things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, 
because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dan Stromberg]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 2:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because
> FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.

FORTRAN isn't that bad.  F77 had too much and too little whitespace
significance, but from what I've heard, F90 is pretty decent.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Dan Stromberg wrote:

> FORTRAN isn't that bad.  F77 had too much and too little whitespace 
> significance, but from what I've heard, F90 is pretty decent.

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."

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Arthur Krewat]

On 3/16/2018 8:08 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Dunno; I taught myself FORTRAN-II after winning a book at school (yes, 
> really!)

I taught myself Fortran after stealing a book from the library a few 
towns over. Returned it a few years later by dropping it in the book 
deposit.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote:

> I taught myself Fortran after stealing a book from the library a few 
> towns over. Returned it a few years later by dropping it in the book 
> deposit.

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."

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Charles H Sauer]

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On 3/16/2018 7:26 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 3/16/2018 8:08 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> Dunno; I taught myself FORTRAN-II after winning a book at school 
>> (yes, really!)
>
> I taught myself Fortran after stealing a book from the library a few 
> towns over. Returned it a few years later by dropping it in the book 
> deposit.

Another book of note, /FORTRAN für Anfänger/ 
(https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-96076-5), was popular 
among UT-Austin doctoral candidates in meeting the foreign language 
requirements...
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Nemo]

On 16/03/2018, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really,
> because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.

Early on, I landed a job requiring VAX FORTRAN but I was not actually
conversant in it -- I told a white lie.  I saw "FORTRAN Tools for
VAX/VMS" at a local technical store and read it cover to cover.  (The
title was an intentional play on Kernighan & Plauger and built similar
tools using FORTRAN -- side topic but whatever happened to Plauger?)
Said implementation pleasantly surprised me:  nothing at all like the
primitive early versions.

N.

>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Bakul Shah]

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On Mar 16, 2018, at 2:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.

He atoned for designing FORTRAN, so to speak, by coming up
with FP, one of the first functional programming languages
(though he called it FP system). See his 1977 Turing Award
lecture: 
  https://doi.org/10.1145%2F359576.359579

IIRC, someone had posted an interpreter for FP to
comp.sources.unix. Ah, here it is: Volume 20, Issue 50.
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sources.unix/O68WmHasQZ8/2v3_YuEbH6IJ

FP's clear inspiration was APL. It didn't succeed but it was
quite influential for the field of functional programming
languages. Though modern FPLs are lambda calculus based (Backus
thought lambda calculus was too powerful and may lead to chaos).

Backus was also involved in the design of Algol58 and Algol60,
which is where he came up with BNF. There is an ancient grammar
notation that is as least as powerful as BNF but it seems Backus
was unaware of it. [Pāṇinian rules can describe languages larger
than CFL but not as large as context sensitive languages]

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because
> FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of
> ​.
>

​Dave -- please be careful about the disparaging comments.

As a system's person, I don't need to write in it, (although I can
understand it when I need too) and neither do I believe many of our
colleagues in the system business; since it is not the right thing for my
or their needs.  But Fortran has a place and it still pays my and many of
our salaries (and I happen to know it paid the salary if a number of folks
on this list and I think, like me still does).


​I'll save people on the list from the full argument and try to keep a
flame war from starting but I offer that you instead read:  Clem Cole's
answer to Is Fortran Still Alive
<https://www.quora.com/Is-Fortran-still-alive/answer/Clem-Cole>  and
Clem Cole's answer to Why is the Fortran language still in use and (most
importantly) relevant in HPC? Is it just because this language has
tremendous numerical calculation capability which is an important part of
HPC?
<https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Fortran-language-still-in-use-and-most-importantly-relevant-in-HPC-Is-it-just-because-this-language-has-tremendous-numerical-calculation-capability-which-is-an-important-part-of-HPC/answer/Clem-Cole>


Simply out (and for those) that don't want to reads the more details
arguments - please don't try to compare Fortran to C, Pascal, Java, Rust *etc.
*or many other languages - please do not knock it because you don't need to
use it or look down on those that do use because it helps them.  But,
instead remember that is in your toolbox, has been and is *an appropriate
solution for many problems*, and is likely to continue to be for many years.

Are their 'better' tools, like the QUERTY keyboard? Sure but they not
economically interesting.  I ask you to please be kind before you make
disparaging comments.   As I point out in those answer, even if I could
wave wand and have all those oce that we have today magically rewritten
into a modern language from C to Rust or something else that strikes your
fancy, there is no way it would be economical (much less wise) to try to
revalidate the years and years of data that Fortran based codes have
created.

As I close, I try to remember that many Frenchman have been
historical annoyed  because French, which is said to be a 'pure and
beautiful' did not become the universal world language, and the wretched
and crass anglo saxon English did.  Yet many 'British' be moan that
'American' is not English either.   And many 'merkins' can hardly
understand people in many parts of the world .  It does not make either
anyone language better than the other.  Both are useful - communications is
passing information between to parties and they all usually get the job
done, some more easily than others.

Today's Fortran is not, the language Backus and team at IBM created in the
late 1950s.   Like English (or 'American English' maybe), it has morphed a
bit and taken ideas from other languages.

'nuf said I hope.

Clem


ᐧ
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Simon]

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personally, when i have add significant modules to fortran projects i have written new code in rat4 which i find an excellent solution - others may disagree.

on the subject of fortran’s language, i remember hearing tell of a French version. anyone ever meet any? 

-Steve


> On 17 Mar 2018, at 13:43, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of​.
>  
> ​Dave -- please be careful about the disparaging comments.
> 
> As a system's person, I don't need to write in it, (although I can understand it when I need too) and neither do I believe many of our colleagues in the system business; since it is not the right thing for my or their needs.  But Fortran has a place and it still pays my and many of our salaries (and I happen to know it paid the salary if a number of folks on this list and I think, like me still does). 
> 
> ​I'll save people on the list from the full argument and try to keep a flame war from starting but I offer that you instead read:  Clem Cole's answer to Is Fortran Still Alive  and
> Clem Cole's answer to Why is the Fortran language still in use and (most importantly) relevant in HPC? Is it just because this language has tremendous numerical calculation capability which is an important part of HPC? 
> 
> Simply out (and for those) that don't want to reads the more details arguments - please don't try to compare Fortran to C, Pascal, Java, Rust etc. or many other languages - please do not knock it because you don't need to use it or look down on those that do use because it helps them.  But, instead remember that is in your toolbox, has been and is an appropriate solution for many problems, and is likely to continue to be for many years.
> 
> Are their 'better' tools, like the QUERTY keyboard? Sure but they not economically interesting.  I ask you to please be kind before you make disparaging comments.   As I point out in those answer, even if I could wave wand and have all those oce that we have today magically rewritten into a modern language from C to Rust or something else that strikes your fancy, there is no way it would be economical (much less wise) to try to revalidate the years and years of data that Fortran based codes have created.
> 
> As I close, I try to remember that many Frenchman have been historical annoyed  because French, which is said to be a 'pure and beautiful' did not become the universal world language, and the wretched and crass anglo saxon English did.  Yet many 'British' be moan that 'American' is not English either.   And many 'merkins' can hardly understand people in many parts of the world .  It does not make either anyone language better than the other.  Both are useful - communications is passing information between to parties and they all usually get the job done, some more easily than others.
> 
> Today's Fortran is not, the language Backus and team at IBM created in the late 1950s.   Like English (or 'American English' maybe), it has morphed a bit and taken ideas from other languages.
> 
> 'nuf said I hope.
> 
> Clem
> 
> 
> ᐧ
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Pierre DAVID]

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On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 05:06:51PM +0000, Steve Simon wrote:
>
>on the subject of fortran’s language, i remember hearing tell of a French version. anyone ever meet any?
>

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

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 17 Mar 2018, at 13:43, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> Simply out (and for those) that don't want to reads the more details arguments - please don't try to compare Fortran to C, Pascal, Java, Rust etc. or many other languages - please do not knock it because you don't need to use it or look down on those that do use because it helps them.  But, instead remember that is in your toolbox, has been and is an appropriate solution for many problems, and is likely to continue to be for many years.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Today's Fortran is not, the language Backus and team at IBM created in the late 1950s.   Like English (or 'American English' maybe), it has morphed a bit and taken ideas from other languages.

Also without wanting to start a war about this, I want to agree strongly with it.  I work somewhere where our main computational tool is a large Fortran program which does things critical to the security (both economic and defence) of the country I live in.  It's officially in Fortran 90 but I think older chunks of it are probably still in FORTRAN 77 and yet other chunks written to more recent standards.

It's a horrible thing, but it's a horrible thing because it has been written by scientists rather than people who have software backgrounds, and written & maintained over something like 30 years or more.  In particular it's not horrible because it's in Fortran: Fortran 90 is a reasonably pleasant language as far as I can see (I learnt FORTRAN 77 and since I don't work directly on this program I'm not really familiar enough with the later standards to make a strong statement), and later standards seem even more pleasant.

We're in the early stages of replacing this program by something which will scale bette (to, eventually, millions rather than thousands of cores).  That program is going to be written in Fortran (with fairly extensive preprocessing to isolate science code from details of the implementation), and that's *the right decision*.

--tim
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Mike Markowski]

On 03/17/2018 09:43 AM, Clem Cole wrote:>
> [...]  But Fortran has a place and it still pays my and
> many of our salaries (and I happen to know it paid the salary if a 
> number of folks on this list and I think, like me still does).
> [...]
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

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Charles Anthony]

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On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 12:15 PM, Pierre DAVID <pdagog at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 05:06:51PM +0000, Steve Simon wrote:
>
>>
>> on the subject of fortran’s language, i remember hearing tell of a French
>> version. anyone ever meet any?
>>
>>
> 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.
>
>
The Multics Pascal compiler has a "-french" option which maps all of the
keywords to French.

Some examples from "pascal_french_keywords.gi.info":

English             French
-------             ------
$export             $exporte
array               tableau
file                fichier
otherwise           autrement
unpack              detasser


-- Charles
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Simon]

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

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul Winalski]

On 3/16/18, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really,
> because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
>
(Mis-)features such as the insignificance of white space made some
sense when the target consumers for the language (numerical analysts)
were accustomed to writing numbers with commas or spaces separating
groups of digits (e.g., 1 234 567 and 1,234,567).  Of course, that
does lead to grammatical nasties such as the need for
context-sensitive lexical analysis.

I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had
read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its
poorly-behaved grammar.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 2:51 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 3/16/18, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> > We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> > things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really,
> > because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
> >
> (Mis-)features such as the insignificance of white space made some
> sense when the target consumers for the language (numerical analysts)
> were accustomed to writing numbers with commas or spaces separating
> groups of digits (e.g., 1 234 567 and 1,234,567).  Of course, that
> does lead to grammatical nasties such as the need for
> context-sensitive lexical analysis.
>
> I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had
> read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its
> poorly-behaved grammar.
>
> -Paul W.
>
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
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 18 Mar 2018, at 18:51, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had
> read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its
> poorly-behaved grammar.

They probably could not have read it: if I'm right, the draft specification for FORTRAN was 1954, with the manual and an implementation following in October 1956 & April 1957.  The Chomsky hierarchy was described by Chomsky in 1956.  So they got FORTRAN 'wrong' because no-one knew what 'right' was, or how it differed from 'wrong' at the point they had to decide what the syntax was going to be.

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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Johnson]

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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... 


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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 6:26 PM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> 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...
>

No boiling oil? I'd say they were going light on you :)

Warner
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 5:07 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> 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.
>

And to bring this back around to Unix, here are a couple of random
questions....

First, in Dennis Ritchie's paper, "The Development of the C Language" (
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html) he mentions the early
days of Unix, Ken taking Doug McIlroy's implementation of "TMG" on the
PDP-7 as a challenge and deciding to produce a "systems programming
language." The first effort was, apparently, "a rapidly scuttled attempt at
Fortran", followed by B.

I'm curious at the FORTRAN effort: what was that about, where did it come
from, and why was it abandoned?

Second, 7th Edition came with the "f77" command implementing
(unsurprisingly) Fortran 77. A paper by Stu Feldman and Peter Weinberger in
Volume 2 describes the compiler and includes this line: "This is believed
to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented." (
https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/vol2/f77.txt)

Was that true? Notable in this paper is mention that the Fortran compiler
can drive the backend of either Ritchie's PDP-11 C compiler *or* Johnson's
portable C compiler. What was the local story? Did this see local use?

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm curious at the FORTRAN effort: what was that about, where did it come
> from, and why was it abandoned?
>
​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.



>
> Second, 7th Edition came with the "f77" command implementing
> (unsurprisingly) Fortran 77. A paper by Stu Feldman and Peter Weinberger in
> Volume 2 describes the compiler and includes this line: "This is believed
> to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented." (
> https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/vol2/f77.txt)
>
​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).




>
> Was that true? Notable in this paper is mention that the Fortran compiler
> can drive the backend of either Ritchie's PDP-11 C compiler *or* Johnson's
> portable C compiler. What was the local story? Did this see local use?
>
​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
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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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.
ᐧ

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:43 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm curious at the FORTRAN effort: what was that about, where did it come
>> from, and why was it abandoned?
>>
> ​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.
>
>
>
>>
>> Second, 7th Edition came with the "f77" command implementing
>> (unsurprisingly) Fortran 77. A paper by Stu Feldman and Peter Weinberger in
>> Volume 2 describes the compiler and includes this line: "This is believed
>> to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented." (
>> https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/vol2/f77.txt)
>>
> ​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).
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Was that true? Notable in this paper is mention that the Fortran compiler
>> can drive the backend of either Ritchie's PDP-11 C compiler *or* Johnson's
>> portable C compiler. What was the local story? Did this see local use?
>>
> ​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
>
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> "This is believed to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be
> implemented." (https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/vol2/f77.
> txt)
>

​Question to Steve or aps -- certainly V7's version could not pass the
validation test as distributed from AT&T and UCB (at Masscomp we actually
ran the validation suite through it in the our 4.1 Vax -- we decided it was
going to be too much work and we had started over with new front and back
ends  when we created a compiler group with ex-DECies - C and Fortran being
the primary).  But I assume at some time folks in Summit did the work on
making the AT&T version pass at least by the timer PCC2.  Assuming it did,
do you have any idea when it was running through and got an official seal
as being validated?

ᐧ
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Steve Johnson]

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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


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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Jon Forrest]

In roughly 1977 I was trying to use the 'fc' Fortran compiler
that came with Version 6 Unix at UC Santa Barbara. I needed to
do some binary I/O to read digitized speech data. That compiler
was very limited so I did what anybody would do back then - I called
Dennis Ritchie, who had written 'fc', to ask him what to do. I remember
he was surprisingly gracious but I don't remember what he said to do.

Version 7 Unix came to UCSB soon afterwards and I started using it.
It was easy to call C routines from it, which I did for a number of
low level purposes. However, I soon discovered some 'f77' bugs.
Fortunately Stu Feldman was visiting UCSB so I was able to demonstrate
the bugs to him personally. Again, I don't remember what came of this
but the Unix world was so small back then that it was common to be able
to communicate with many of the key developers.

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul Winalski]

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.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[George Michaelson]

Once f2c could compile "zork" I stopped caring. Maybe that says it all.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Clem Cole]

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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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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Jon Forrest]

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

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Nickolas]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2018, George Michaelson wrote:

> Once f2c could compile "zork" I stopped caring. Maybe that says it all.

XD

That's the only Fortran program that matters to me. ;)

-uso.

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

VAX C was still pretty awful in the late 90s, while their FORTRAN was
really excellent, not least because of the high quality optimizer.

> Back to Unix ...

Agreed.  :)

...but first: being Norwegian, I have to plug another really good
FORTRAN compiler; the one in SINTRAN, the operating system for the
Norwegian built mini computers from Norsk Data.  They took FORTRAN-77,
and added even more bling to it, resulting in a compiler that could
accept the following program:

C    This FORTRAN progam may be compiled and run on a Norsk Data
C    computer running SINTRAN and the FTN compiler.  It uses only
C    FORTRAN reserved words, and contains just one numerical
C    constant, in a character string (a format specifier).  When
C    you run it, it prints a well known mathematical construct...
C
C    Even FORTRAN is a block structured programming language:

      PROGRAM
     ;PROGRAM;INTEGERIF,INTEGER,GOTO,IMPLICIT;REALREAL,DIMENSION,EXTERNA
     AL,FORMAT,END;INTEGERLOGICAL;REALCOMPLEX,DATA,CALL,ASSIGN,CHARACTER
     R;DOFORIF=INTEGER,INTEGER;ENDDO;INTEGER=IF+IF;GOTO=INTEGER*INTEGER*
     *INTEGER*INTEGER-INTEGER-IF;CALLFUNCTION(IMPLICIT,REAL,DIMENSION,EX
     XTERNAL,FORMAT,END,LOGICAL,COMPLEX,DATA,CALL,ASSIGN,CHARACTER);CALL
     LSUBROUTINE(IMPLICIT,LOGICAL,GOTO,IF,INTEGER);END;SUBROUTINEFUNCTIO
     ON(IMPLICIT,REAL,DIMENSION,EXTERNAL,FORMAT,END,LOGICAL,COMPLEX,DATA
     A,CALL,ASSIGN,CHARACTER);RETURN;END;SUBROUTINESUBROUTINE(IMPLICIT,L
     LOGICAL,GOTO,IF,INTEGER);INTEGERGOTO,IMPLICIT(GOTO),LOGICAL(GOTO),I
     IF,INTEGER,EXTERNAL,RETURN;DOFOREXTERNAL=IF,GOTO;DOFORRETURN=INTEGE
     ER,EXTERNAL-IF;IMPLICIT(RETURN)=LOGICAL(RETURN)+LOGICAL(RETURN-IF);
     ;ENDDO;IMPLICIT(IF)=IF;IMPLICIT(EXTERNAL)=IF;DOFORRETURN=IF,GOTO-EX
     XTERNAL;WRITE(IF,'(''$  '')');ENDDO;DOFORRETURN=IF,EXTERNAL;WRITE(I
     IF,'(''$''I4)')IMPLICIT(RETURN);ENDDO;WRITE(IF,'( /)');DOFORRETURN=
     =IF,GOTO;LOGICAL(RETURN)=IMPLICIT(RETURN);ENDDO;ENDDO;END

Anyone care to guess what the output looks like?

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 09:58:48AM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote:
> Here is the FORTRAN story as I remember it.
> 
> [much removed for brevity]

> 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...

Isn't it amusing (aka depressing) how some stuff has to be crammed down
people's throats?

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Arthur Krewat]

On 3/19/2018 2:40 PM, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS wrote:
>
> VAX C was still pretty awful in the late 90s, while their FORTRAN was
> really excellent, not least because of the high quality optimizer.
>

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

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Paul Winalski]

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.

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[George Michaelson]

I have some sympathy with the compiler writers, because if you have
invested in passing compliance and test suites, to make code which NAG
will then be compiled through, somebody out there is going to use this
code to test the strain in a bridge (topical...) or something similar,
and when it fails under load because the loop terminated the way you
didn't expect, things are very ugly.

If you know your compiler is what you stand behind, it makes sense to
push for it to be the one adopted. The likelihood the linker causes
the problem feels lower.

Actually I think it was just not-invented-here, but I do have some sympathy.

-G

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> [...]
> 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).
>
[...]
>

Thanks Steve.

Ok, so if we take a step back, could it be said that one of the reasons for
the initial scuttled attempt at Fortran as a Unix systems programming
language was that it was the local "language of record" at the time? I'm
curious how far the effort got...was it just the proverbial cat reading the
paper, "I should really do a Fortran dialect..." or was there actual code?
Did anything survive into the modern era?

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Ron Natalie]

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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).

 

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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Paul Winalski]

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On 3/20/18, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.
Screwdrivers always make bad hammers.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Warner Losh]

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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 3/20/18, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
> programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.
> Screwdrivers always make bad hammers.
>

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
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> 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,
>
​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.



> but its character handling was awful.
>
​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.




>   I ended up writing almost all that stuff in assembler
> ​ ​
> (which fortunately the PDP-11 is wonderful for).
>
> ​You and many others ;-)

Clem​
ᐧ
ᐧ
ᐧ
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Ron Natalie]

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> 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.  
We made heavy use of PASCAL on the TOPS10 system at JHU, but I don't know what the origin of it was.    I'd be surprised if it wasn't DEC.   That shop wasn't overly innovative. 
>>  but its character handling was awful.  
​> 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.

Ratfor got you decent control structures but it didn't get around the fortran data model suckage.
 
 
ᐧ
ᐧ
ᐧ

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Bakul Shah]

On Mar 20, 2018, at 2:36 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

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_bootstrapped_on_a_DEC-System_10

[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]

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2018-Mar-20 16:21:12 -0400, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
>Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
>programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.

Note that Pr1meOS was written in Fortran.  I did study it but no longer
recall what extensions it had to make that practical.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Paul Winalski]

On 3/20/18, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
DEC did do a Pascal for RSX.  I don't remember if it supported RT11 or
RSTS.  DEC did a BASIC compiler for RSTS and RSX.  RSX and especially
RT were designed mainly for real-time process control in laboratories.
   A lot of the programming was in assembler for efficiency reasons
(both time and space).

-Paul W.

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Ron Natalie]

>    DEC did a BASIC compiler for RSTS and RSX

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.

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Ron Natalie]

> Note that Pr1meOS was written in Fortran.  I did study it but no longer
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?

[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Dennis Boone]

 > >Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
 > >programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.

 > Note that Pr1meOS was written in Fortran.  I did study it but no
 > longer recall what extensions it had to make that practical.

It's just PRIMOS, no E.  And the '1' in place of 'i' thing was just a
marketing/logo gimmick.

Surprisingly few language extensions.  Octal constants (:1234567).  A
file inclusion facility ($INSERT FILE>PATH>XYZ.INS.FTN).  Not much else.

Originally, much of PRIMOS was in FORTRAN, with some assembler (PMA).
Later, significant rewrites and extensions were done in PL/1 derived
systems languages (PLP and SPL), and even later some in Modula.

Awfulness is relative.  Bill Poduska has said that writing most of the
system in a higher level language saved them a lot of time, over using
assembler.

De

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Paul McJones <paul at mcjones.org>

    > I suspect the CPU architect (Gene Amdahl -- not exactly a dullard)
    > intended programmers store array elements at increasing memory
    > addresses, and reference an array element relative to the address of the
    > last element plus one. This would allow a single index register (and
    > there were only three) to be used as the index and the (decreasing)
    > count.

I suspect the younger members of the list, who've only ever lived in a world
in which one lights ones cigars with mega-gates, so to speak, may be missing
the implication here.

Back when the 704 (a _tube_ machine) was built, a register meant a whole row
of tubes. That's why early machines had few/one register(s).

So being able to double up on what a register did like this was _HYYUUGE_.

       Noel

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Otto Moerbeek]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 02:52:29PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:

> On 3/17/2018 1:49 PM, Paul McJones wrote:
> > It first ran on the IBM 704, whose index registers subtracted (as did
> > the follow-on 709, 7090, etc), so array indexing went from higher memory
> > addresses to lower.
> 
> Leave it to IBM to do something backwards.
> 
> Of course, that was in 1954, so I can't complain, it was 11 years before I
> was born. But that's ... odd.
> 
> Was subtraction easier than addition with digital electronics back then? I
> would think that they were both the same level of effort (clock cycles) so
> why do something obviously backwards logically?
> 
> ak

Speculation:

If you only have a conditional jump on zero, a loop that ends at an
index becoming zero is more easy, it saves an extra subtraction to
test for the end condition. You load the size of the array into the
index register, and then loop until it becomes zero. If you then use
the end the array as the base, you still have a forward loops since the
effective address will be computed as end - index with index begin
decremented in the loop.

	-Otto

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 14:52:29 -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 3/17/2018 1:49 PM, Paul McJones wrote:
>> It first ran on the IBM 704, whose index registers subtracted (as did
>> the follow-on 709, 7090, etc), so array indexing went from higher
>> memory addresses to lower.
>
> Leave it to IBM to do something backwards.
>
> Of course, that was in 1954, so I can't complain, it was 11 years before
> I was born. But that's ... odd.
>
> Was subtraction easier than addition with digital electronics back
> then?

Yes.  The basic arithmetic operation on ones-complement machines
(which meant just about every big computer of the day) was
subtraction.

> I would think that they were both the same level of effort (clock
> cycles) so why do something obviously backwards logically?

If I recall this correctly, the big issue was -0.  It was easier to
avoid this value with a subtractive adder than with an additive adder.
Possibly the adder itself was also marginally simpler as a result.

The other interesting thing about the 704 and 709 was that there was a
3 bit field for the decrement registers (as the index were called),
and each bit selected one register, so you could use any or all of the
registers in an operation.  I'd like to claim that this was the reason
for 3 array subscripts in early FORTRAN, but last time I made a claim
like that I was soundly trounced.

Later 70* machines expanded to 7 decrement registers, and this feature
was lost.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Steve Johnson]

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Let me offer a somewhat different perspective on FORTRAN.  When an
airplane is designed, the design undergoes a number of engineering
tests under simulation at the design stage.  Many countries require
that these simulation runs be archived for the lifetime of the
airplane so that, in the event of a crash, they can be run again with
the conditions experienced by the aircraft to see whether the problem
was in the design.  Airplanes commonly take 10 years from first
design to first shipment.  And then are sold for 10 years or so. 
And the planes can fly for up to 30 years after that.   So these
tests need to be written in a computer language that can be run 50
years in the future -- that is a stipulation of the archive
requirement.  There really aren't any alternative languages that I'm
aware of that could meet this criterion -- that's particularly true
today, when there is a sea change from serial to parallel programming
and it's hard to pick a winner with five decades of life ahead of
it...

Does anyone have any candidates?

Steve


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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul McJones]

On 3/17/2018 12:22 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> Leave it to IBM to do something backwards.
>
> Of course, that was in 1954, so I can't complain, it was 11 years before
> I was born. But that's ... odd.
>
> Was subtraction easier than addition with digital electronics back then?
> I would think that they were both the same level of effort (clock
> cycles) so why do something obviously backwards logically?

Subtraction was done by taking the two's complement and adding. I 
suspect the CPU architect (Gene Amdahl -- not exactly a dullard) 
intended programmers store array elements at increasing memory 
addresses, and reference an array element relative to the address of the 
last element plus one. This would allow a single index register (and 
there were only three) to be used as the index and the (decreasing) 
count. See the example on page 97 of:

James A. Saxon
Programming the IBM 7090: A Self-Instructional Programmed Manual
Prentice-Hall, 1963
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7090/books/Saxon_Programming_the_IBM_7090_1963.pdf

The Fortran compiler writers decided to reverse the layout of array 
elements so a Fortran subscript could be used directly in an index register.
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul McJones]

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On 3/17/2018 12:22 PM, Steve Simon <steve at quintile.net> wrote:

> on the subject of fortran’s language, i remember hearing tell of a French version. anyone ever meet any?

Yes: here is the French version of the original Fortran manual, with 
keywords in French (via 
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/):

Anonymous. FORTRAN Programmation Automatique de L'Ordinateur IBM 704 : 
Manuel du Programmeur. IBM France, Institut de Calcul Scientifique, 
Paris. No date, 51 pages. Given to Paul McJones by John Backus.
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102663111.05.01.acc.pdf
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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Arthur Krewat]

On 3/17/2018 1:49 PM, Paul McJones wrote:
> It first ran on the IBM 704, whose index registers subtracted (as did 
> the follow-on 709, 7090, etc), so array indexing went from higher 
> memory addresses to lower.

Leave it to IBM to do something backwards.

Of course, that was in 1954, so I can't complain, it was 11 years before 
I was born. But that's ... odd.

Was subtraction easier than addition with digital electronics back then? 
I would think that they were both the same level of effort (clock 
cycles) so why do something obviously backwards logically?

ak

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul McJones]

On 3/17/2018 8:54 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> ...  Was it the 704, or the 709?  I recall that the
> array indexing order mapped directly into its index register or something
> ...

It first ran on the IBM 704, whose index registers subtracted (as did 
the follow-on 709, 7090, etc), so array indexing went from higher memory 
addresses to lower.

> The bookshelf: I had most of those books once; what's the one on the
> bottom right?  It has a "paperback" look about it, but I can't quite make
> it out because of the reflection on the spine.

I'm not sure, and things have shifted since then on the shelves, but I 
sent the original photo to your email address.


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[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Sat, 17 Mar 2018, Paul McJones wrote:

>       [...] because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
> 
> I think of FORTRAN as having established the very idea of high-level 
> programming languages. [...]

Thanks; that's the sort of discussion that I was hoping to promote 
("stirring" is a long-established tradition here in Oz).  And I happen to 
agree, oddly enough...  Was it the 704, or the 709?  I recall that the 
array indexing order mapped directly into its index register or something 
(like C's "do { ... } while (--i)" maps straight into "SOB" (although I 
don't know whether the former was influenced by the latter).

I have an article somewhere in AUUGN (I don't know which) describing our 
visit to a DECUS conference.  One of the presentations was a slide that 
compared high- and low-level languages.  I don't remember what definition 
they used, and I can't recall whether BLISS was high or low (I think it 
was "low with a pointer towards the right"), but they showed FORTRAN on 
the right, and me being me I piped up with "FORTRAN a high-level 
language?"

I don't recall the exact wording in my subsequent AUUGN report, but it 
went something like "Half the room broke up into fits of the giggles, and 
the other half were stonily wondering what was so funny."

I never did get that job with DEC some years afterwards, mostly because
got borged by Compact (?) with an ensuing management broom (and I've long 
since lost track of who bought out whom since).

> Disclosure: I worked with John in the 1970s (on functional programming) 
> — see:
> 
> http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/04/01/60/ .

Neat story!

The bookshelf: I had most of those books once; what's the one on the 
bottom right?  It has a "paperback" look about it, but I can't quite make 
it out because of the reflection on the spine.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Paul McJones]

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Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other 
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, 
> because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.

I think of FORTRAN as having established the very idea of high-level programming languages. For example, John McCarthy’s first idea for what became LISP was to extend FORTRAN with function subroutines written in assembly language for list-manipulation. (He had to give up on this idea when he realized a conditional expression operator wouldn’t work correctly since both the then-expression and the else-expression would be evaluated before the condition was tested.) The original FORTRAN compiler pioneered code optimization, generating code good enough for the users at the physics labs and aerospace companies. For more on this compiler, see:

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/

Disclosure: I worked with John in the 1970s (on functional programming) — see:

http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/04/01/60/ .


Paul McJones

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