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0 pointshilbert425y ago0 comments

"I read Complex numbers came in FORTRAN IV, so mid 60’s."

FYI, this link [PDF] https://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/paul.johnson-2/... contains the peculiar statement "Over the next few years, FORTRAN II would also add support for the DOUBLE PRECISION and COMPLEX data types."

At face value, that statement implies complex numbers came later but before FORTRAN III, which also implies a point release (FORTRAN II was released in 1958). Moreover, I read somewhere that FORTRAN III had it but it wasn't widely released. Likely then that FORTRAN IV was the first widely released version with complex numbers. As it was released in 1961, we should assume then that this was the likely date.

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tobmlt5y ago

Pretty cool, thanks for the details! This is about what I’d expect from ancient FORTRAN. (I read fortran IV off Wikipedia, maybe there was fine print)

hilbert42OP5y ago

You'll note from one of my other posts that FORTRAN-IV was my intro into programming. However, that was toward the end of the decade not the beginning. By then, many universities were running the WATFOR FORTRAN-IV compiler from U. Waterloo.

At the time it was anything but ancient. We students felt both cocky and privileged in that we knew that we were some of the very few people in the country who had access to a state-of-the-art IBM mainframe.

BTW, the mainframe, a System/360, had just 44kB memory and ran 7 concurrent operations at once. It was a red-letter day when the '360 got upgraded to 77kB memory. The university's rag had the fact as large headlines on its front page.

tobmlt5y ago

I like it! Sorry to call older dialects ancient. Being a Fortran programmer is somewhat like being from a red state, I find. I naturally self deprecate (or stick with c++ as appropriate) in front of others.

I used to work on a system that was older than me, but immaculately refactored (to the authors admittedly rare taste) through the years. It had run on all kinds of hardware in the 80s, but was different enough from its predecessor programs that I am not sure what all it ran on - I recall maybe DEC, maybe pdp this and that, maybe a 360?? being mentioned. The guy who led the team that wrote it passed on two years ago now. Man he was a trip! He wasn’t old. He used to smoke, darn it.

Sounds like you had some fun times with the 360! Makes me want to retro-compute a bit. Actually my phone makes me want to retro compute as well, every time I “type” on it. ;)

Cheers!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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tobmlt5y ago

Pretty cool, thanks for the details! This is about what I’d expect from ancient FORTRAN. (I read fortran IV off Wikipedia, maybe there was fine print)

hilbert42OP5y ago

tobmlt5y ago

Sounds like you had some fun times with the 360! Makes me want to retro-compute a bit. Actually my phone makes me want to retro compute as well, every time I “type” on it. ;)

Cheers!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse