Winston,

 > Such a bizarre design does not make much sense unless the
 > designers were
 > trying to directly accomodate the decimal Hollerith
 > card punching
 > machines and the BCD decimal Hollerith Census data....

    Since you have already conceded that ForTran preceded the IBM 360, I do
not see why this is important. The American Standard Code has largely
superseded EBCD. BCD had its uses for computation of financial transactions
where floating point was not precise enough, but it had to be expanded to
cope with real teletypes, as opposed to electric adding machines. F77 uses
ASCII. It was F77 I originally mentioned. I do not remember what numerical
representation the earlier ForTran IV used, but it still called numbers
"Hollerith" constants 'for historical reasons'. ISTR that the
actual representation was entirely platform dependent, that is ASCII on
micro based systems and EBCDIC on Big Blues.

Best Wishes,
Bill.

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