Related to this, did Bob Bemer ever preserve a copy of IBM COMTRAN source? For those unaware of it, this was one of the predecessors of COBOL.
While thinking about Bob and his contributions to ASCII, I'm reminded that one of the constraints imposed on the FORTRAN language was the lack of what we think of as common punctuation on the 026 kepunch keyboard. Indeed, many of the punctuation characters we accept as normal in "C" weren't in the 026/6-bit character set. Lowercase? Nope. There were two version of the character set--the "commercial" version lacked parentheses, for example. Thank heavens that most 026s were equipped with the "scientific" set. If you were unfortunate enough to have to punch cards on an 024 and decided to interpret them on a 557, you got the no-parentheses character set. --Chuck
