On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 04:47:50PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: > Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > IIRC, each [FORTRAN punch] card had a sequence number. > > Paul Scott writes: > > That a choice which got in the way of the development stage. Who wanted > > to punch a whole new deck for each small change? > > IIRC the numbers did not have to be sequential. That is, you could use 10 > 20 30 ... and then replace 20 with 15, 20, and 25 when you made a change. > The card sorter just put the cards in ascending order.
Isn't that where line numbers came from? Since each line would have corresponded to a card? I know that Fortran didn't have every single line numbered (only for e.g. gotos), but I'm assuming that this is where BASIC got the idea. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
