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From: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: lisp (was: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <4930@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 28-Aug-87 20:59:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: jade.4930
Posted: Fri Aug 28 20:59:46 1987
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In article <1022@argus.UUCP> ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng) writes:
<> I'm not sure what sense this makes.  Are there even three C or three FORTRAN
<> implementations which accept *exactly* the same language?????
<
<Hm. If you write something in FORTRAN 2, it will be accepted by FORTRAN 4,
<FORTRAN 66, and FORTRAN 77.  But I think that's cheating a bit, since the
<languages were designed to be upward compatible.  Note: I have not tried
<*ALL* the language features of FORTRAN 2 (the few that there are).  When

Back in the dark ages (when I was in college :-), I had access to four
(or was it five?) FORTRAN compilers, *all* based on FORTRAN IV.

Given any two, I could write code that would compile in either one but
not the other, or produce different results if it ran on both. In many
cases, I could also write code that would compile & run on one, and
die on the others.

The compilers in question? VAX/VMS FORT, IBM/MVS FORTH and WATFIV,
PDP-11/??? f4 running under v6 unix.

So much for FORTRAN being the same. But at least with it, you could
write code that would run on all four. The LISP implementations
available at the same time didn't have the same syntax for defining
functions, or addition, or ... 

Then again, it was pretty easy to write LISP code in one so that it
would accept the others. Not so true for FORTRAN.

	<mike
--
Lather was thirty years old today,			Mike Meyer
They took away all of his toys.				mwm@berkeley.edu
His mother sent newspaper clippings to him,		ucbvax!mwm
About his old friends who'd stopped being boys.		mwm@ucbjade.BITNET