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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:22:54 -0000 (UTC)
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According to Charlie Gibbs  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>:
>> If you look at Algol, it really spawned the likes of B,  C, and Pascal 
>> and so on . Its use of local variables being a key feature. They 
>> completely replaced it.

Somewhat but see below.

>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).

That was certainly my experience.

>> COBOL was really a standalone thing. You might say SQL owes it some homage.
>
>So does PL/I (or is it PL/1 this week?), which allowed data structures
>to be declared COBOL-style.

C's data structures came from COBOL via PL/I.  COBOL had (has) very powerful
data structures but weak control structures.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly