On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:50 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm curious at the FORTRAN effort: what was that about, where did it come from, and why was it abandoned?

​I'll let Ken, Steve or Doug answer definitively that​ but I would suspect - it is a lot of work and at time t0, it was less valuable than some of the other efforts going at the time.

 

Second, 7th Edition came with the "f77" command implementing (unsurprisingly) Fortran 77. A paper by Stu Feldman and Peter Weinberger in Volume 2 describes the compiler and includes this line: "This is believed to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented." (https://s3.amazonaws.com/plan9-bell-labs/7thEdMan/vol2/f77.txt)

​Mumble, although probably true in absolute fact.  The DEC VAX/VMS Fortran compiler was contemporary.   I have always said that the best piece of work DEC Marketing ever did was convince the world that VMS Fortran was F77 (it was not).   It ended up being a super-set, although it did not start out that way (similar to people believing VT-100's are ANSI - they are and in that case never did fully conform).

 

Was that true? Notable in this paper is mention that the Fortran compiler can drive the backend of either Ritchie's PDP-11 C compiler *or* Johnson's portable C compiler. What was the local story? Did this see local use?

​I used the PCC/VAX version extensively (as well as ratfor) for the 'users space' part of my thesis work.   My housemate, Tom Quarles, had developed SPICE3 (in C) and Ellis Cohen had written SPICE2 in FORTRAN.   FPS had done a great deal of development on the array processor that was the basis for my work, all in Ratfor but assuming VMS under the coveres (they wrote an optimizing parallel Fortran compiler in same -- those guys are now the Portland Compiler Group).​

 

​I worked, although moving stuff from VMS to BSD was huge because F77 != VMS Fortran.  Much of the 'grunt' work I had was making all that work.​   In fact, it was this work that I found a bug in the C compiler runtimes, that I have written about elsewhere.  The ratfor code called F77, which shared C's runtime.

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