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FORTRAN - All your problems will be solved.

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IainB:
Hacker News gave a link to the Software Preservation Group where they have a document FORTRAN - Backus et al - Preliminary Report (1954)

Been reading through it.
This is an extract:
...Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging, it should
be possible to solve problems for less than half the cost that would be required
without such a system. Furthermore, since it will be possible to
devote nearly all usable machine time to problem solution instead of only half
the usable machine time, the output of a given machine should be almost
doubled...

--- End quote ---
Hmm.                     :o

It's probably worth a read though - interesting bit of history.
By the way, FORTRAN is alive and well - at the The Fortran Company.

TaoPhoenix:
Wasn't old BASIC a sorta grandchild of Fortran?

I've peeked at some site news, there's some new development work going on in the language and they might have a new version in a couple of years.

Renegade:
I used to program in Fortran years ago, but I really forget it all now. As I remember, I could be wrong, BASIC wasn't really all that similar to Fortran.

One of the things that stuck out about Fortran, as I remember, was that the way it allocates memory was basically the reverse of Pascal. I really didn't like Pascal, and loved Fortran.

I remember a few years ago talking with a fellow working in defense. He was doing work on the battle/war simulators for the US/Korean defense against North Korea, and he worked in Fortran for it.

IainB:
Wasn't old BASIC a sorta grandchild of Fortran?
-TaoPhoenix (May 14, 2012, 08:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
I don't think so. The only similarities were that they were both high-level languages. Otherwise quite different in syntax.
And BASIC was an "interpretive" code - I think it was compiled line by line as it executed, so you could hit a bug midway through execution. With FORTRAN, it had to be compiled/debugged prior to execution. I think FORTRAN 77 had an optimising compiler too.

BASIC
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
The original Dartmouth BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was typically a standard feature, and often part of the firmware of the machine.
BASIC remains popular in numerous dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. In 2006, 59% of developers for the .NET Framework used Visual Basic .NET as their only programming language.[1]

--- End quote ---

FORTRAN
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California[1] in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing [2] and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran (a blend derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with previous versions. Successive versions have added support for processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, modular programming and object-oriented programming (Fortran 90 / 95), and generic programming (Fortran 2003).

--- End quote ---

...I remember a few years ago talking with a fellow working in defense. He was doing work on the battle/war simulators for the US/Korean defense against North Korea, and he worked in Fortran for it.
-Renegade (May 14, 2012, 08:38 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, it was really handy for solving Operations Research-type problems or wherever serious mathematical number-crunching was required.

kalos:
how does it compare with AHK, and particularly with third-party GUI automation?

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