[lotuseclat79]

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Trivia: It all started with Fortran in November, 1954.

-- Tom

[cwwozniak]

Originally Posted by lotuseclat79

Trivia: It all started with Fortran in November, 1954.

Makes you wonder how the Fortran editor and compiler were created if not with the help of some other programming language?

[Mikrondel]

Originally Posted by cwwozniak

Makes you wonder how the Fortran editor and compiler were created if not with the help of some other programming language?

I think there were just way too many machine languages and assembly languages to make it worthwhile listing them.

[lotuseclat79]

Originally Posted by cwwozniak

Makes you wonder how the Fortran editor and compiler were created if not with the help of some other programming language?

Back in those days, the inspiration for Lisp came from the implementation of the car, cdr registers in an IBM machine at the time, of course, on which a Fortran compiler had been implemented.

I found refererene to such a trivia fact in two different books and proceeded to win a bet with a couple of PhD's about Fortran's influence on Lisp. Upon seeing my references thrust in front of him, one PhD immediately handed over a $20 bill - I think the bet was only for a 6-pack while the other PhD blinked and never paid up (although he was my boss's boss's boss at the time).

To make a long story shorter, back in those days, they didn't exactly have a very good tool suite with editors and since they were making the compilers all they probably had were assemblers in which to write their machine code which they had to do before they could write the compiler and eventually be able to rewrite it in Fortran to boot itself (I'm not sure if they actually did that, but it became a more common thing to do - bootstrap your new compiler in its own language).

-- Tom