* [TUHS] RIP John Backus @ 2018-03-16 21:52 Dave Horsfall 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg ` (4 more replies) 0 siblings, 5 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-16 21:52 UTC (permalink / raw) 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." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg 2018-03-17 0:08 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 1:57 ` Nemo ` (3 subsequent siblings) 4 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Dan Stromberg @ 2018-03-16 23:42 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg @ 2018-03-17 0:08 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 0:26 ` Arthur Krewat 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-17 0:08 UTC (permalink / raw) 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." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 0:08 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-17 0:26 ` Arthur Krewat 2018-03-17 0:36 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 1:40 ` Charles H Sauer 0 siblings, 2 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Arthur Krewat @ 2018-03-17 0:26 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 0:26 ` Arthur Krewat @ 2018-03-17 0:36 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 1:40 ` Charles H Sauer 1 sibling, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-17 0:36 UTC (permalink / raw) 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." ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 0:26 ` Arthur Krewat 2018-03-17 0:36 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2018-03-17 1:40 ` Charles H Sauer 1 sibling, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Charles H Sauer @ 2018-03-17 1:40 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 706 bytes --] 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... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180316/ddc71ce9/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg @ 2018-03-17 1:57 ` Nemo 2018-03-17 7:20 ` Bakul Shah ` (2 subsequent siblings) 4 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Nemo @ 2018-03-17 1:57 UTC (permalink / raw) 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." > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg 2018-03-17 1:57 ` Nemo @ 2018-03-17 7:20 ` Bakul Shah 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 4 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Bakul Shah @ 2018-03-17 7:20 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1250 bytes --] 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] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2018-03-17 7:20 ` Bakul Shah @ 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon ` (2 more replies) 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 4 siblings, 3 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-17 13:43 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3386 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180317/7cdb735e/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon 2018-03-17 19:15 ` Pierre DAVID 2018-03-17 19:22 ` Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-17 19:28 ` Mike Markowski 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Steve Simon @ 2018-03-17 17:06 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3474 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180317/8b7dff12/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon @ 2018-03-17 19:15 ` Pierre DAVID 2018-03-17 19:41 ` Charles Anthony 2018-03-18 11:02 ` Steve Simon 0 siblings, 2 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Pierre DAVID @ 2018-03-17 19:15 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 634 bytes --] 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 19:15 ` Pierre DAVID @ 2018-03-17 19:41 ` Charles Anthony 2018-03-18 11:02 ` Steve Simon 1 sibling, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Charles Anthony @ 2018-03-17 19:41 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1006 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180317/746702c0/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 19:15 ` Pierre DAVID 2018-03-17 19:41 ` Charles Anthony @ 2018-03-18 11:02 ` Steve Simon 1 sibling, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Steve Simon @ 2018-03-18 11:02 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon @ 2018-03-17 19:22 ` Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-17 19:28 ` Mike Markowski 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Tim Bradshaw @ 2018-03-17 19:22 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180317/949939f8/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon 2018-03-17 19:22 ` Tim Bradshaw @ 2018-03-17 19:28 ` Mike Markowski 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Mike Markowski @ 2018-03-17 19:28 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall ` (3 preceding siblings ...) 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole ` (2 more replies) 4 siblings, 3 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-18 18:51 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 14:50 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-18 21:26 ` [TUHS] RIP John Backus Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-19 0:26 ` Steve Johnson 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-18 21:07 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5584 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180318/5a4702a8/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 14:50 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-19 15:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 15:55 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 2 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2018-03-19 14:50 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/5452fa3e/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 14:50 ` Dan Cross @ 2018-03-19 15:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 15:46 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 15:55 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 15:43 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2340 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/d3990c8f/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 15:43 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 15:46 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 17:39 ` Paul Winalski 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 15:46 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2758 bytes --] 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 > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/df2c2825/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 15:46 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 17:39 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-19 17:43 ` George Michaelson 2018-03-19 17:48 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 2 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-19 17:39 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 17:39 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-19 17:43 ` George Michaelson 2018-03-19 18:16 ` Steve Nickolas 2018-03-19 17:48 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: George Michaelson @ 2018-03-19 17:43 UTC (permalink / raw) Once f2c could compile "zork" I stopped caring. Maybe that says it all. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 17:43 ` George Michaelson @ 2018-03-19 18:16 ` Steve Nickolas 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Steve Nickolas @ 2018-03-19 18:16 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 17:39 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-19 17:43 ` George Michaelson @ 2018-03-19 17:48 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 17:59 ` Jon Forrest 1 sibling, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 17:48 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1990 bytes --] 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. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/42064f3d/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 17:48 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 17:59 ` Jon Forrest 2018-03-19 18:40 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Jon Forrest @ 2018-03-19 17:59 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 17:59 ` Jon Forrest @ 2018-03-19 18:40 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo 2018-03-19 19:40 ` Arthur Krewat 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo @ 2018-03-19 18:40 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 487 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/cbfb2413/attachment.sig> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 18:40 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo @ 2018-03-19 19:40 ` Arthur Krewat 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Arthur Krewat @ 2018-03-19 19:40 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 14:50 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-19 15:43 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 15:55 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 16:58 ` [TUHS] FORTRAN Steve Johnson 1 sibling, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 15:55 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1022 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/0b38cfe8/attachment-0001.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-19 15:55 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-19 16:58 ` Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Steve Johnson @ 2018-03-19 16:58 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4675 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/189d314f/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-19 16:58 ` [TUHS] FORTRAN Steve Johnson @ 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest 2018-03-20 17:42 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-19 18:47 ` Larry McVoy 2018-03-20 18:15 ` Dan Cross 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Jon Forrest @ 2018-03-19 17:32 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest @ 2018-03-20 17:42 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 17:47 ` George Michaelson 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-20 17:42 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 17:42 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-20 17:47 ` George Michaelson 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: George Michaelson @ 2018-03-20 17:47 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-19 16:58 ` [TUHS] FORTRAN Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest @ 2018-03-19 18:47 ` Larry McVoy 2018-03-20 18:15 ` Dan Cross 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2018-03-19 18:47 UTC (permalink / raw) 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? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-19 16:58 ` [TUHS] FORTRAN Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest 2018-03-19 18:47 ` Larry McVoy @ 2018-03-20 18:15 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-20 19:55 ` Ron Natalie 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2018-03-20 18:15 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180320/42cd3b35/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 18:15 ` Dan Cross @ 2018-03-20 19:55 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 2 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-20 19:55 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 546 bytes --] 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). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180320/e88c9b9a/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 19:55 ` Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 20:27 ` Warner Losh ` (2 more replies) 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 3 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-20 20:21 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 402 bytes --] 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-20 20:27 ` Warner Losh 2018-03-21 8:10 ` Peter Jeremy 2018-03-21 21:15 ` Dennis Boone 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2018-03-20 20:27 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1185 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180320/9d76599d/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 20:27 ` Warner Losh @ 2018-03-21 8:10 ` Peter Jeremy 2018-03-21 20:56 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-21 21:15 ` Dennis Boone 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Peter Jeremy @ 2018-03-21 8:10 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 963 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180321/05cf7c64/attachment.sig> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-21 8:10 ` Peter Jeremy @ 2018-03-21 20:56 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-21 20:56 UTC (permalink / raw) > 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? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 20:27 ` Warner Losh 2018-03-21 8:10 ` Peter Jeremy @ 2018-03-21 21:15 ` Dennis Boone 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Dennis Boone @ 2018-03-21 21:15 UTC (permalink / raw) > >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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 19:55 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-20 21:59 ` Ron Natalie ` (2 more replies) 1 sibling, 3 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2018-03-20 21:36 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2306 bytes --] 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180320/35237ea8/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-20 21:59 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2018-03-21 13:48 ` Paul Winalski 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-20 21:59 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 869 bytes --] > 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-20 21:59 ` Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-20 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2018-03-21 13:48 ` Paul Winalski 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Bakul Shah @ 2018-03-20 23:00 UTC (permalink / raw) 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] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-20 21:59 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 23:00 ` Bakul Shah @ 2018-03-21 13:48 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-21 20:55 ` Ron Natalie 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-21 13:48 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-21 13:48 ` Paul Winalski @ 2018-03-21 20:55 ` Ron Natalie 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Ron Natalie @ 2018-03-21 20:55 UTC (permalink / raw) > 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole @ 2018-03-18 21:26 ` Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-19 0:26 ` Steve Johnson 2 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Tim Bradshaw @ 2018-03-18 21:26 UTC (permalink / raw) 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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180318/23beeec0/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-18 21:26 ` [TUHS] RIP John Backus Tim Bradshaw @ 2018-03-19 0:26 ` Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 14:26 ` Warner Losh 2 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Steve Johnson @ 2018-03-19 0:26 UTC (permalink / raw) [-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --] [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2642 bytes --] 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... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180318/2a26a542/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] RIP John Backus 2018-03-19 0:26 ` Steve Johnson @ 2018-03-19 14:26 ` Warner Losh 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2018-03-19 14:26 UTC (permalink / raw) 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180319/937a8920/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN @ 2018-03-21 14:51 Noel Chiappa 2018-03-21 21:57 ` Charles Anthony 0 siblings, 1 reply; 51+ messages in thread From: Noel Chiappa @ 2018-03-21 14:51 UTC (permalink / raw) > From: "Steve Johnson" So, I have this persistent memory that I read, in some early Multics (possibly CTSS, but ISTR it was Multics) document, a footnote explaining the origin of the term 'daemon'. I went looking for it, but couldn't find it in a 'quick' scan. I did find this, though, which is of some interest: R. A. Freiburghouse, "The Multics PL/1 Compiler" (available online here: http://multicians.org/pl1-raf.html if anyone is interested). > 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. So, in that I read: The entire compiler and the Multics operating system were written in EPL, a large subset of PL/1 ... The EPL compiler was built by a team headed by M. D. McIlroy and R. Morris ... Several members of the Multics PL/1 project modified the original EPL compiler to improve its object code performance, and utilized the knowledge acquired from this experience in the design of the Multics PL/1 compiler. The EPL compiler was written when the _original_ PL/1 compiler (supposedly being produced by a consulting company, Digitek) blew up. More detail is available here: http://multicians.org/pl1.html I assume it's the Digitek compiler you were thinking of above? Noel ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] FORTRAN 2018-03-21 14:51 [TUHS] FORTRAN Noel Chiappa @ 2018-03-21 21:57 ` Charles Anthony 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Charles Anthony @ 2018-03-21 21:57 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 7:51 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > > From: "Steve Johnson" > > So, I have this persistent memory that I read, in some early Multics > (possibly > CTSS, but ISTR it was Multics) document, a footnote explaining the origin > of > the term 'daemon'. I went looking for it, but couldn't find it in a 'quick' > scan. > From multician.org: http://multicians.org/mgd.html: " daemon A beneficent spirit. A process, not associated with a human operator, that runs all the time and waits for requests to do something for a user. This term is respectable English; the application to computer processes is usually credited to M. J. Bailey, working on the design of CTSS in the early 60s. [JHS] "I'm working from memory here, but I think this is the story. Although the word 'process' wasn't in the vocabulary yet, we had just figured out that what one would now call 'system processes' were a solution to several problems, and we were looking for a good label for them. A British gentleman named Michael (Mick) Bailey, working on the CTSS programming staff at MIT, suggested the word 'daemon' and quoted the OED in support of both the meaning and spelling. Bailey's etymology was so impeccable that questions as to whether the spelling should be simplified to 'demon' went on for only about 30 seconds. On both CTSS and Multics, the documentation and the process names use the spelling 'daemon.' I suspect that the date on the memo that first used the term would be in 1962 or 1963."(note to Kirk McKusick, 24 Aug 1988)" -- Charles -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20180321/0af1ebd2/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
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* [TUHS] FORTRAN [not found] <mailman.48.1521640130.3788.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> @ 2018-03-21 22:58 ` Johnny Billquist 0 siblings, 0 replies; 51+ messages in thread From: Johnny Billquist @ 2018-03-21 22:58 UTC (permalink / raw) On 2018-03-21 14:48, Paul Winalski<paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote: > > 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. DEC did both COBOL, DIBOL, PASCAL, FORTRAN (-IV, -IV-PLUS, -77), C as well as Datatrieve for RSX and RSTS/E. Some of these were also available for RT-11. Admittedly, the C compiler was very late to the game. > A lot of the programming was in assembler for efficiency reasons > (both time and space). Yes. And MACRO-11 is pretty nice. 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 51+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2018-03-21 22:58 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 51+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2018-03-16 21:52 [TUHS] RIP John Backus Dave Horsfall 2018-03-16 23:42 ` Dan Stromberg 2018-03-17 0:08 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 0:26 ` Arthur Krewat 2018-03-17 0:36 ` Dave Horsfall 2018-03-17 1:40 ` Charles H Sauer 2018-03-17 1:57 ` Nemo 2018-03-17 7:20 ` Bakul Shah 2018-03-17 13:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-17 17:06 ` Steve Simon 2018-03-17 19:15 ` Pierre DAVID 2018-03-17 19:41 ` Charles Anthony 2018-03-18 11:02 ` Steve Simon 2018-03-17 19:22 ` Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-17 19:28 ` Mike Markowski 2018-03-18 18:51 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-18 21:07 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 14:50 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-19 15:43 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 15:46 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 17:39 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-19 17:43 ` George Michaelson 2018-03-19 18:16 ` Steve Nickolas 2018-03-19 17:48 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 17:59 ` Jon Forrest 2018-03-19 18:40 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo 2018-03-19 19:40 ` Arthur Krewat 2018-03-19 15:55 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-19 16:58 ` [TUHS] FORTRAN Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 17:32 ` Jon Forrest 2018-03-20 17:42 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 17:47 ` George Michaelson 2018-03-19 18:47 ` Larry McVoy 2018-03-20 18:15 ` Dan Cross 2018-03-20 19:55 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 20:21 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-20 20:27 ` Warner Losh 2018-03-21 8:10 ` Peter Jeremy 2018-03-21 20:56 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-21 21:15 ` Dennis Boone 2018-03-20 21:36 ` Clem Cole 2018-03-20 21:59 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-20 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2018-03-21 13:48 ` Paul Winalski 2018-03-21 20:55 ` Ron Natalie 2018-03-18 21:26 ` [TUHS] RIP John Backus Tim Bradshaw 2018-03-19 0:26 ` Steve Johnson 2018-03-19 14:26 ` Warner Losh 2018-03-21 14:51 [TUHS] FORTRAN Noel Chiappa 2018-03-21 21:57 ` Charles Anthony [not found] <mailman.48.1521640130.3788.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> 2018-03-21 22:58 ` Johnny Billquist
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