13 Aug
2017
13 Aug
'17
2:42 p.m.
Ah yes, the arithmetic if. Long ago, I wrote a short paper in the style of
"real programmers don't use pascal" defending the arithmetic if and
encouraging its adoption in newer languages. (All tongue in cheek, of
course.)
For fun, I found it, and put it up at www.skeeve.com/if.pdf.
Enjoy,
Arnold
"Steve Johnson" <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
A little Googling shows that the IF I mentioned was
called the
"arithmetic IF". There was also a Computed GOTO that branched to
one of N labels depending on the value of the expression. And an
Assigned GOTO whose main use, as I remember, was to allow for error
recovery when a subroutine failed...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Horsfall" <dave(a)horsfall.org>
To:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sun, 13 Aug 2017 14:26:53 +1000 (EST)
Subject:Re: [TUHS] origin of string.h and ctype.h
On Sat, 12 Aug 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
Don't have much to add except to note that
early FORTRANs had a
version
of IF that took three statement numbers and did a
(gasp) GOTO to
the
first if the expression in the IF was negative,
to the second if it
was
0, and to the third if it was positive. And
some mainframes had
an
instruction that did exactly that as well...
Wasn't that the computed GOTO?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."