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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ALTER, ASSIGN and labels-as-values
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2024 01:41:07 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Mon, 3 Jun 2024 10:33:32 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 30 May 2024 10:15:54 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>> 
>>> This was using hand-punched cards, writing FORTRAN 2 code with the
>>> Hollerith text constants so you had to count very carefully:
>>>
>>>      FORMAT 27HTHIS IS A VERY LONG TEXT STRING...
>> 
>> Hey, did you not notice the columns were numbered? So all you had to do
>> to determine the length of the string was subtract column numbers?
>> 
> Hey, did you not read what I wrote about this being hand-punched cards?
> By the time I got to the end of the string it was too late to go back
> and update the 27H count.

Card-punch machines had an option for that too, didn’t they? Certainly the 
IBM 129 that I used could do that: copy the card to a new card, up to but 
not including the incorrect part, then enter the correction, then copy the 
rest of the card.

Remember, punched cards had already been in use for about a century and a 
half by that point, so techniques for dealing with their foibles were 
well-known.