That looks like BASIC. I once had a student ask why SCOPE on the CDC 6400 didn't do something that would have required backspacing the card reader. I thought that my "Because the crystal ball on channel 5 is broken." was obvious sarcasm, but a colleague told me years later that he thought it was a straight answer.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Paul Gilmartin <0000042bfe9c879d-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2025 8:53 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: ISPF edit macro to sort and delete duplicate records External Message: Use Caution On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 01:01:12 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: > >Or, going back farther, I'd change some thing in PL/I, e.g., retain the ALGOL >60 distinction between assignment and equality. > It may have started with FORTRAN (which lacked relational operators.) In the day I knew some mini computer languages which distinguished assignments with a token such as: LET X = A + B I worked next to a physics graduate student who wrote a FORTRAN program with a matrix of assignments that visually resembled a system of linear equations. Somehow, with remarkable persistence, he got it to compile and print out a vector of variables. Only *then* he asked me for help: "Why did it not solve my system‽" == gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
