Eric Smith wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:BXLE was a misguided attempt to close the "semantic gap" between high level languages (which FORTRAN actually isn't)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?
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. Perhaps "not an HLL" is too strong, but it certainly was not conceived as machine-independent. FORTRAN had no features that did not translate quite directly into 704 machine language. -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."