Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>
> Douglas Seay <seay@absyss.fr> writes:
> >I'll agree that they aren't ivory tower languages, and that the language
> >specification may have been created hand-in-hand with the tool, but I
> >don't see how that makes them less of "languages". This m ight be
> >ancient history, but was there a formal specification of COBOL, FORTRAN
> >or APL before the first implementation?]
>
> COBOL - yes. (COBOL was "designed by committee".)
> Fortran - I _think_ the answer is 'yes'.
> APL - most certainly! Iverson's book preceded the implementation.
> <snip>
IF I remember Backus's paper in the proceedings of the first HOPL
conference, Fortran began as a brief proposal with some of the syntax
well defined, ie. simple arithmentic expressions, and the explicit
concepts of programs, functions and subroutines. It also must have
sketched some ideas as to how optimization was to be performed, because
that was a major thrust behind the language effort. However, several
aspects of the langage were not specified in any detail at all. The
syntax and implementation of I/O in particular was, I believe, left
primarilly to one team member who found that an interpreted
implementation was a good way to test his ideas, and then found when the
decision was made to ship Fortran (I) that he did not have time to
convert the I/O implementation to a compiled form. Interpreted I/O is
still used (in some contexts) in Fortran, because users foundthis
accidental feature to be useful. Also while Backus's original proposal
had the concept of subroutines this construct was not available in
Fortran (I), (after more than three years of work on a one year project
they had to get something out of the door and that aspect of the
language was not ready), but was instead introduced in Fortran II.
--
William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2 FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323 Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545 Email: wclodius@lanl.gov
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