On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
[...]
So the point is, FORTRAN was dominant at Bell Labs for most of the time
that C was being developed. There was a group that was pushing the
adoption of PL/1, being used to code Multics, but the compiler was late and
not very good and it never really caught on. The GE compiler was one of
the three that I abstracted the machine independent code from for PCC (the
other two were PDP-11 and IBM 360).
[...]
Thanks Steve.
Ok, so if we take a step back, could it be said that one of the reasons for
the initial scuttled attempt at Fortran as a Unix systems programming
language was that it was the local "language of record" at the time? I'm
curious how far the effort got...was it just the proverbial cat reading the
paper, "I should really do a Fortran dialect..." or was there actual code?
Did anything survive into the modern era?
- Dan C.