On 1/14/25 16:50, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: > On Wed, 2025-01-15 at 00:32 +0000, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > > I have the 1401 FORTRAN-II compiler. I reverse engineered it from > operational tapes, then the author (Gary Mokotoff) sent me a scan of > his listings, that he thought he lost when he retired. My reverse- > engineered code has far more comments. It works in an interesting way:..
I remember running 1620 card FORTRAN. It sounds much like the 1401 version (no surprise). You first read in the compiler, then the source program; an intermediate deck is punched. The second pass of the compiler is then read in, followed by the intermediate deck punched in pass 1, then any subroutine decks. My recollection is that the precision could be specified by the user; integers could be up to 10 digits and floating mantissas could be up to 28 digits in length. An interesting feature was that subroutines were not required to have the same precision as the main program. It was a fairly time-consuming process and program errors set the whole process back to square 1. IBM, realizing the essence of "cumbersome", produced a companion product, called GOTRAN, where the compiler/runtime remained resident and source statements were compiled into an intermediate form and executed interpretively. Of course, execution was slower and the language was simpler (e.g. the FORMAT statement was omitted). --Chuck
