Was FORTRAN buggy 4312

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 08:26:09 -0400, Joe Morris wrote

Yeah, well, I'm still around and playing computer on a Saturday instead of golf on account of all the rain from Ernesto.

I can't answer your question. I was a user, an engineer in the Propulsion Section, trying to solve a problem. I was a complete beginner in programming, with no knowledge of anything except what I read in The FORTRAN Programmer's Primer and the Reference Manual, and the first in the department to use the 704 so no one could give me advice. (I had roundoff problems in my numerical integration.) That was in the summer and fall of 1958, before I went into the Air Force.

I'd guess my job was batched with other people's jobs and run overnight, so wouldn't that imply use of a monitor?

My next encounter with Fortran was at MITRE in 1960-61, working with Department D11. I was in D16, where we were running tests on the SAGE computer. D11 reduced the data for us. My job was to specify the data reduction programs for them to write, and to test their programs to make sure they were returning us the data we wanted. Since I was the one who did the recording, I had to know where and when to capture the data from SAGE, so it was a real education for me. They programmed in FAST, which stood for Fortran something-something Transcriber. It was a preprocessor for Fortran that made it COMPOOL sensitive and I think added some functions like ELSE. They were using the 709; it was a big deal when they moved up to a 7090.