[LINK] RIP Sandy Douglas

[David Lochrin]

On Wednesday 05 May 2010 12:45, Roger Clarke wrote:
> Oh dear.  I haven't programmed in Fortran *since* 1982.
> 
> Let's see, there was:
> -   Fortran with no version number, used in 1967
> -   [...]
> -   ANSI Fortran77, used c. 1980-82
>      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_77
>      (Finally, it was feasible to write structured code)
>      (Remember structured code, back when quality mattered?)

Then there was Fortran-90, -95, and -2003.

According to an ISO IEC statement dated 21st April 2010 "The Final Draft international Standard (FDIS) for Fortran 2008, N1826, is ready and will be sent to SC22 today."  See http://www.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/

My personal Linux box runs the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) Fortran95 compiler, just for old times sake!  And the GCC project is interesting in its own right - pre-compilers for many languages map them into a common syntax for compilation.

> And we understood back then that object-orientation was a 
> re-discovery of capabilities embedded in Algol68.  Not that many 
> of us ever got to use that language (although I understand that 
> Pascal was a descendant of it).

An even earlier realisation of OO was the IBM event-simulation language known as General Purpose Simulation System or GPSS.  I used it very effectively in the late 70s, but didn't realise its architectural basis in object orientation till much later.  I understand it was originally written in Fortran.

David