On Mon, 31 Aug 2020 17:47:11 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I first coded in FORTRAN. all there was then was ALGOL, FORTRAN and
> COBOL.
>
> Then came B, BCPL and C...and then after that trash languages designed
> to let monkeys think they could code

Here's a list showing when the first compiler for each language was
released:

FORTRAN  1957
Algol 60 1960
COBOL   1960
BCPL  1967
C  1972

... which is interesting. I'd always thought that BCPL preceded Algol 60
because its a relatively primitive language. I didn't realise that ALGOL
60 and COBOL both had working compilers released in the same year

FWIW, Grace Hopper's FLOWMATIC, a recognisable ancestor of COBOL,  had
its first complete compiler out in 1959 and her MATH-MATIC, which looks
more similar to FLOWMATIC than to FORTRAN (which was IBM proprietary),
was released in 1957, the same year as FORTRAN's first compiler.

Its kind of interesting, too, that FLOWMATIC, MATH_MATIC and BASIC
(released 1964) all used what are effectively line numbers as labels and
all share the problem of renumbering lines when you need to add more code
between existing lines.

AFAIK only JOSS and its successors JEAN (on ICL kit) and FOCAL (on DEC
kit) solved that problem: these languages use real numbers for code lines:

1.1 to 1.9
1.2 set a=0
1.3 to 2.0
1.9 do something else

and treating all lines with the same whole number as a subroutine:

2.55 do part 3

I wrote a bit of JEAN back in the day and preferred it to BASIC even
though its syntax prevents conditionals from having an else branch:

1.01 type "Hiya" if b=0
1.02 type "boo hiss" if b=1

--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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