theodorethomas

You know, I have read this a lot. But the Programmer's Reference Manual, dated October 15, 1956 clearly has it as Fᴏʀᴛʀᴀɴ, which used "small caps", so I am not so sure anymore.

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There is one under-appreciated aspect of Fortran.

Here is something that started as a specification of the input format of one particular program-tool. That input format was then cloned and mutated by dozens of me-too program-tools. Eventually that format was able to support an interpretation as a language with its own language-like abstractions. That is astonishing and I think was not on the radar of computing machinery people in the 50s.

many such cases

I object to this mis-use of the word "ocean". If I can't sail there then it's not an ocean. Luckily, Titan still has an ocean. But all the others have iceans.

Yes, this is how I used the "handbrake" function to "park" on a steep uphill.

The Fortran 2023 Standard introduces new intrinsics:

"The intrinsic functions ACOSPI, ASINPI, ATANPI, ATAN2PI, COSPI, SINPI, and TANPI are trigonometric functions in which angles are specified in halfrevolutions (that is, as multiples of π)."

I wondered if a city-wide synchronised Pulse-Width-Modulation of LED lights could allow astrophotography (or even naked-eye astronomy) to be possible again, with a filter synchronised to the off-cycle.

Reading the Steelman document is like reading a shopping list of everything that's gone into modern Fortran.

I wonder how this combines with Richardson's Theorem.

Except the 486 had hardware floating point, essential for technical work.

One consequence of that is that the Earth, as seen from the nearside of the Moon's surface, just hangs there, never moving, apart from a small wobble.

Apollo Command Module interior colour is similar, and gorgeous.

I remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/30 for her tourist guidebook work. She later upgraded to a 6100 PowerMac "pizza-box", various iMacs, G3/G4/G5, whereas I saved a quad-200MHz PentiumPro monster (Compaq Professional Workstation 8000, tricked up to 3GB RAM) from the skip. I regret taking that to the recycling centre many years later.

There are two ways of constructing software: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

— C. A. R. Hoare