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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2024 21:14:04 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:24:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> At the risk of planting flame bait <nudge, nudge>, here in North America
> Algol was generally considered the domain of computer science weenies,
> while FORTRAN and COBOL were used for applications in the Real World
> [tm] (science/engineering and business, respectively).

It didn’t help that Algol-60 had nothing resembling standardized I/O 
facilities, whereas these were an integral feature of both Fortran and 
COBOL.

This was remedied later in Algol-68, at the cost of adding a lot of 
complexity.

This was in the days before POSIX, of course, when every computer system 
seemed to do I/O entirely differently. Most of those, um, idiosyncrasies, 
have thankfully evaporated.

> So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
> to be declared COBOL-style.

PL/I was IBM’s attempt at a Grand Unification of both “business” and 
“scientific” programming in one language. If you thought C++ programming 
was full of surprises when your program did unexpected things, PL/I 
invented the whole genre of “surprise-ridden programming language”.