On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Steve Johnson <scj@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.