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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: He's not the only one at it again!
Summary: My comment stands
Message-ID: <2404@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 26 Jul 90 01:25:05 GMT
References: <1990Jul21.004616.649@Stardent.COM> <388@e2big.mko.dec.com> <25630@cs.yale.edu>
Followup-To: comp.lang.misc
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 52

In article <25630@cs.yale.edu>, zenith-steven@cs.yale.edu (Steven Ericsson Zenith) writes:
> In article <2400@l.cc.purdue.edu>, cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:

			.........................

> From Juliussen and Juliussen's Computer Industry Almanac:
> 
> 1944 Grace Murray Hopper starts a distinquished career in the computer industry
>      by being the first programmer for the Mark 1.
> 1953 IBM ships its first stored program computer, the 701. [...]
> 1954 FORTRAN is created by John Backus at IBM following his 1953 SPEEDCO
> program.
>      Harlan Herrick runs first successful FORTRAN program.
> 1954 Gene Amdahl develops the first operating system, used on IBM 704.
> 1957 FORTRAN is introduced.
> 1958 ALGOL, first called IAL (International Algebraic Language), is presented
>      in Zurich.
> 1959 COBOL is defined by the Conference on Data Systems Languages (Codasyl)
>      based on Grace Hoppers's Flow-Matic.

> [Sorry no earlier mention of Flow-Matic]

Well, I did get my dates somewhat wrong.  But there was considerable similarity
between the 701 and 704 and 709, and it is still the case that Fortran was
written specifically for  that machine design.

> 
> |>  The extremely poor attempt to produce a machine-independent 
> |>computational language ALGOL was the followup.
> 
> This is an unjustifiable comment, since ALGOL has had a far more profound
> influence on the design of programming languages than either FORTRAN or
> COBOL.

You are, unfortunately, absolutely correct here.  Fortran was not intended to
be complete.  ALGOL was, and failed miserably here.  ALGOL was intended to be
a programming language adequate for all numerical computations on all machines.
But it did not handle all the hardware options a good programmer would use on
the existing machines at that time.  Hardware produced a simultaneous quotient
and remainder; ALGOL made no provision for it.  Even then, mathematicians were
using multiple precision computations.  Likewise, no provision for that,
although most hardware had.  A machine without overflow was unusual; again,
no provision in the language.  

I claim I have made a strong case against ALGOL being even a good programming
language for mathematics.  The weaknesses of ALGOL and Fortran are to a
considerable extent responsible for these instructions disappearing from
the hardware.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)	{purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!cik(UUCP)