On 4/4/25 20:15, ben via cctalk wrote: > I thought FORTRAN IV was the portable programing language. > They have talked about having smarter high level programing languages > for years. Has that gotten anywhere?
Back in the heyday of FORTRAN, the universe of architectures was a lot more diverse and foreign to languages such as C. Non-binary (decimal) numeric representations, Binary ones' complement math, vendor-unique character sets (it's why FORTRAN (and COBOL) is written using a very small common character set)--and lack of character-handling operations, as well as Boolean functions. I think that the original PALASM was written in "portable" FORTRAN. One of the more common ways to start a "portable" program was to READ a card with the character set punched onto it in A1 format. You manipulated characters by referring to their positions in the alpha A1 array. --Chuck
