Category: Fortran
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After 55.5 years the Fortran Specialist Group has a new home
In the 1960s and 1970s, new developments in Cobol and Fortran language standards and implementations regularly appeared on the front page of the weekly computer papers (Algol 60 news sometimes appeared). Various language user groups were created, which produced newsletters and held meetups (this term did not become common until a decade or two ago). […]
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Long term growth of programming language use
The names of files containing source code often include a suffix denoting the programming language used, e.g., .c for C source code. These suffixes provide a cheap and cheerful method for estimating programming language use within a file system directory. This method has its flaws, with two main factors introducing uncertainty into the results: The […]
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Procedure nesting a once common idiom
Structured programming was a popular program design methodology that many developers/managers claimed to be using in the 1970s and 1980s. Like all popular methodologies, everybody had/has their own idea about what it involves, and as always, consultancies sprang up to promote their take on things. The 1972 book Structured programming provides a taste of the […]