Question about Dungeon game on the PDP 36

I've never seen an genuine (published by a vendor, by ANSI, etc.) presentation anywhere with the "F" and "T" in large cap and the rest in small-drop cap. Usually when I've seen it written as "ForTran" (or the variant you mention) it's from someone with a bi-cap (often Pascal) background for variable names. There's a lucid section breastled "How should one spell FORTRAN-Fortran?" in the memory (which isn't any guarantee it's correct, of course).

Yes, I do know.

I also know that the "TRAN" part has historically been taken as "translator," "translating" and "transform" (and variants of that word).

It's intersting that the FAQ I mention below makes no attempt to explain this.

Of perhaps even greater interest, the manual for the first FORTRAN system (IBM 704, see below) uses both the terms "translating" and "transforms" in reference to the FORTRAN system in the introduction, but never says which (if either) the TRAN portion stands for. I suspect the original authors meant it to mean all of these things. I'd be interested in seeing anything from them on the subject but didn't run across it in my quick search.

In reference see the manual for the IBM 704 version from 1956. In formatted documents it was often written with the "ortran" part in small caps, as shown in this manual. Of some contextual interest here, the above manual uses "Fortran" (capitalized w-lower case letters) on the cover, but all other references throughout are either FORTRAN or the large-small caps (with the "T" as a small cap) format.

As may be, the currently accepted form is "Fortran," which the person I was responding to was using in reference to IV, which is why I pointed out what I was doing. By inference, if you're familiar with Fortran history, the code I referred to itself was referencing an earlier (pre-Fortran 90) version of the language. As I recall, IV should correctly be FORTRAN IV rather than Fortran IV, but I've seen both formats in wide use (even in material from when IV was new) and since he clearly knew what he was talking about I buttumed he was simply going along with the convention he'd experienced. And there's also the argument that a name change applies retroactively. And then there's those of us who resist such change. I usually still use UNIX, for example, although damn near everyone else seems to have gone to "Unix."

Wiki has a decent short summary of the history of the language. By the time I got into it, I was using mostly FORTRAN 77, but I had to study the history in order to pick the right manuals for updating-modernizing older code. I was no longer programming in the language when Fortran 90 came out.

- Bill