Questions tagged [fortran]
Questions about versions of the FORTRAN language relevant to retrocomputing: FORTRAN, FORTRAN II, FORTRAN IV, FORTRAN 66, FORTRAN 77, ...
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Which version of Fortran was the first to print backtraces?
I went through the first Fortran manual and didn't see anything about a backtrace being printed on abnormal termination.
Did that exist in the first version, or was it implemented later?
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GCC to make Amiga executables, including Fortran support?
I have been compiling some command line programs to run on the classic Commodore Amiga. I started with GCC on WinUAE which worked but I realised I didn't have the understanding of the memory stack and ...
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How was character data handled in Fortran IV/66?
One of the notable contributions in FORTRAN 77 was the CHARACTER data type, which made character processing quite usable.
As I understand it, FORTRAN 66 (sometimes called FORTRAN IV, but they're not ...
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Looking for documentation or source for CERN Fortran programming aids
In the 1970s, the CERN Program Library for IBM/CDC included a few FORTRAN source analysis tools. As mentioned in CERN Computer Newsletter 141,
Q. SERVICE OR HOUSEKEEPING-PROGRAMMING AIDS
...
*X ...
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What does this 1970s punched-card format mean?
The 1974 Texas Regional Programming Contest (a predecessor of the ICPC) describes an input format:
A room description will be contained on a single card with the format: (1X, I2, 2X, 12 (A1, I2, 2X))....
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What sort of intermediate representation did the first Fortran compiler use?
Proebsting's Law asserts that improvements to compiler technology double the performance of typical programs every 18 years, but even granted that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it's not really ...
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Are there any primary sources for the “passing constant by reference” behavior in old Fortran compilers?
Occasionally I have heard references to a peculiarity of certain (old) Fortran compilers, with regards to subprogram argument passing. Here is an example, from an answer to a Stack Overflow question:
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Did other computer companies need to license Fortran from IBM?
Reading a fascinating online book about the history of computing, I came across this passage on http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/bit-by-bit-contents/chapter-seven/7-5-assembly-language-...
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Who are the people associated with Simula, Assembler and Fortran in this video?
I am watching a recording of a discussion panel ‘Unix50 - Unix Today and Tomorrow’, part of which contains Bjarne Stroustrup’s talk ‘From C to C++’, discussing the history of C++.
At 20:46 there is a ...
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Which language was faster at executing programs, Algol or Fortran?
For scientific and high performance computing Algol was considered, and possibly is still considered by some, to be a more powerful language than Fortran. For the same algorithm encoded in both ...
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What did the DoD think Fortran lacked?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL the project to design COBOL began when
On 28 and 29 May 1959 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting), a meeting was held at the Pentagon ...
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Was this FORTRAN "extension" originated by IBM?
This question has been prompted by a recent question about the assigned GOTO operator.
It appears that some early FORTRAN implementations supported a non-obvious construct: using an indexed variable ...
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Why did the assigned goto statement in Fortran need a label list?
FORTRAN had an 'assigned goto' statement. Firstly, a statement number is assigned to a variable:
ASSIGN 42 TO L
Subsequently, one can obey
GOTO L
which (given the preceding ASSIGN) would transfer ...
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When did FORTRAN decide on signed integers?
I have personally always been of the opinion that it would make sense for the default integer type to be unsigned, though it's been a long time since that would've been a live issue for debate; C in ...
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How did dusty deck Fortran handle overflow?
In Fortran 77, numerical code that ran on IBM, CDC, Cray etc, how was overflow typically handled?
Did it raise an exception? (I would expect such an exception to be inexact on vector machines, i.e. to ...
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Which pre-IEEE computers had a single precision FPU and implemented double precision floats in software?
Before the formats of floating point numbers have been standardized in IEEE 754 in 1985, different vendors had used many different floating point formats, some of them listed on the Data Format and ...
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Fortran variable type defaults - origin
In older versions of Fortran, e.g. 77, variables did not need to be declared. If the name starts with I, J, K, L, M, or N then it would be assumed to be an INTEGER. Otherwise, it would be assumed to ...
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Do any mainframe emulators exist with a functional FORTRAN compiler?
Similar to this question, but generalized to any mainframe computer from before the microprocessor era, does there exist an emulator and OS for a vintage mainframe computer that will run the output ...
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Does a CDC 1604 emulator exist with a functional FORTRAN compiler?
The first FORTRAN compiler for the Soviet BESM-6 mainframe was written by means of manually retargeting the assembly code of the CDC 1604 FORTRAN compiler donated by CERN to JINR.
As a result is it ...
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How to render FORTRAN overprinting in HTML? [closed]
Consider a FORTRAN program
РRINТ 1
1 FОRМАТ(1Х,’ GООD ВУЕ НЕLLО, WОRLD’/’+ХХХХ ХХХ’)
ЕND
(YMMV re the number of leading spaces to align Xes with "GOOD BYE")
Its output, using the SIMH ...
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