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From: Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 17:52:04 -0700
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The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 24/09/2024 23:36, Peter Flass wrote:
>> R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> wrote:
>>> rbowman wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:11:19 +0100, Sn!pe wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> No mention of ALGOL, the ALGorithmic Language?  It was contemporaneous
>>>>> with both FORmula TRANslator and COmmon Business-Oriented Language.
>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL>
>>>> 
>>>> ALGOL's impact on succeeding languages was much greater than its actual
>>>> use.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> ALGOL60 was the language where a test of equality between two floating
>>> point numbers was actually a test of "close enough for ALGOL".  If I
>>> want to test for "approximately equal" then I want a different operator.
>>> How well did it handle character strings?  Any language which could not
>>> handle them was a language I wanted no part of.
>>> 
>> 
>> C is just pathetic at character strings.
>> 
> Not really.
> They are clearly defined entities and you could construct any routines 
> to manipualate them you liked
> 
> 

That’s like saying Assembler is great at handling strings. You cam write
routines to do whatever you want.

Another thing PL/I got from COBOL is “natural” string handling. Assign a
short string to a larger any the result is automatically blank-padded.
Assign a longer to a shorter and the longer is truncated, with or without
an error. The lengths are all handled by the compiler, so you never get
overruns. I don’t know what ALGOL does. Burroughs ALGOL-58 didn’t handle
strings well. Maybe ALGOL-60 fixed this.

-- 
Pete