From owner-sc22wg5 Mon Mar 18 21:10:03 2002 Received: from he101war.uk.vianw.net (he101war.uk.vianw.net [195.102.249.208]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id VAA92353 for ; Mon, 18 Mar 2002 21:09:30 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from Miles@bluechiplearning.com) Received: from [195.102.193.164] (helo=[195.102.193.164]) by he101war.uk.vianw.net with esmtp (Exim 3.22 #5) id 16n3O6-0002dk-00; Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:05:46 +0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 20:07:29 +0000 Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.2330) Fortran archeology From: Miles Ellis To: Michael Metcalf , Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <200203181907.UAA92023@dkuug.dk> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit On 18/3/02 7:08 pm Michael Metcalf said: > Dear Friends, > It happens quite frequently that people ask on the net about what went > on at some particular epoch of Fortran's existence. I've tried to put > together a brief list of readily-available literature that might help them > to find out (attached). I'd be grateful for any corrections/additions, with > the condition that any addition be reasonably likely to be available in a > good academic library. > Hi Mike, Here are a couple of others that I quoted in my PhD thesis [Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1983]: Backus, J.W., et al (12 co-authors!) The FORTRAN automatic coding system. In Proc. Western Joint Computer Conference, 1957. [I don't know if this is the 'original paper' you refer to in your list] Backus, John. The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III. In ACM Sigplan History of Programming Languages Conference - Preprints, published in ACM Sigplan Notices 13(8), pp 165-180, August 1978. [Anyone who has never read this set of preprints has missed a real treat!] Incidentally, in my research into the early history of programming languages as a background to my thesis I came across this rather nice quote, which was the concluding paragraph of the paper entitled "IBM Speedcoding and other automatic-programming systems" that John Backus and H Herrick presented in 1954 at the Office of Naval Research Symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers: "A programmer might not be considered too unreasonable if he were willing only to produce the formulas for the numerical solution of his problem, and perhaps a plan showing how the data was to be moved from one storage hierarchy to another, and then demanded that the machine produce the results for his problem. No doubt if he were too insistent next week about this sort of thing he would be subject to psychiatric observation. However next year he might be taken more seriously." Later the same year, on November 10 1954, IBM published the "Specifications for the IBM mathematical FORmula TRANslation system, Fortran" and the rest is history! Incidentally, I have only just noticed that in that first IBM paper the name of the language is spelled "Fortran" and not "FORTRAN". It took us another 40 years to get back to that way of writing it! I hope that this may be useful, With best wishes, Miles -------------- Dr Miles Ellis Managing Director: Blue Chip Learning Limited Telephone: +44 1629 57542 Mobile: +44 7958 465614 Email: Miles@bluechiplearning.com