Was FORTRAN buggy 4311

FWIW a copy of the original Fortran (I) manual is available at

Note that READ and FORMAT existed in Fortran (I). READ was originally intended to read cards with separate statements "READ TAPE", "READ DRUM", (and corresponding PUNCH, WRITE ... statements for output) for input from the most commonly available input media at the time. These were replaced by a smaller set of I-O statements in Fortran II, adding OPEN. INQUIRE etc statements so that I-Odevice characteristics could be specified in a uniform manner independent of the actual data transmission statements. Hard disks first became available shortly after Fortran (I) but for many years were so expensive (or limited in their storage) that tapes were the dominant I-O media, and it was common to refer to any input-output file as a tape.

Note that that all the allowed statements in Fortran (I) are given in Appendix B (page 50). The variety of I-O statements were simplified in Fortran II to READ, WRITE, PRINT, and (PUNCH), with Fortran (I) did not allow users to define their own functions, (although buttembly language functions could be called), or subroutines. User defined procedures were added in Fortran II and were the main reason for Fortran II. Fortran (I) also defined a number of machine specific statements (e.g., SENSE LIGHT) that were dropped in Fortran II.