Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!meissner
From: meissner@xyzzy.UUCP (Usenet Administration)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: FORTRAN Horror
Message-ID: <704@xyzzy.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 88 14:54:10 GMT
References: <24861@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1135@pembina.UUCP> <2424@saturn.ucsc.edu> <25461@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <515@drilex.UUCP>
Reply-To: meissner@xyzzy.UUCP (Michael Meissner)
Organization: Data General (Languages @ Research Triangle Park, NC.)
Lines: 20

In article <515@drilex.UUCP> dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson) writes:
| I've long been fascinated with how the architecture of their first
| implementation affects languages.  Many so-called machine-independent
| languages actually reflect quite a bit of the hardware available to their
| designers.

	...

| Can anybody else point to other examples of this?  Are there any in Cobol or
| Ada, or other committee-designed languages?

According to the History of Programming Languages, Cobol actually has a
requirement in it that makes in mutually hard in all architectures of the
day.  The requirement is for 18 digit arithmetic, which was chosen because
neither the decimal machines of the day or the binary machines could fit
the value in a register, and thus would have an unfair advantage over the
other.  Of course, nowadays, you can fit 18 decimal digits in a 64 bit
binary register (so does that make a Cray a good Cobol machine :-).
-- 
Michael Meissner, Data General.		Uucp: ...!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!meissner
					Arpa/Csnet:  meissner@dg-rtp.DG.COM