Re: Question on ProDOS SmartPort drive remapping

[Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com>]

I wrote:
> There are plenty of legitimate complaints one could make about Fortran,
> but I've never before heard anyone claim that it is not an HLL.  How
> do you justify that?

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> The original FORTRAN had limitations quite transparently derived from
> the 704 architecture, and FORTRAN IV had the limitations raised in
> accordance with the extensions of the 7094!
>
> As an example, the three-level DO loop nesting limit was a consequence
> of the 704's (and up to 7090's) three index registers.

The arithmetic IF was a consequence of the 704/709/709x architecture as well,
but nevertheless FORTRAN compilers were developed for other machines.

> Perhaps "not an HLL" is too strong, but it certainly was not conceived
> as machine-independent.

The amazing thing about a dancing bear isn't how well it dances, but the fact
that it dances at all.  By modern HLL standards the original Fortran is quite
crude, but in 1957, Fortran must have been pretty f@#$ing amazing.  For that
matter, so was Commercial Translator, the predecessor of COBOL.

Eric