> It is known, was indeed emphasized by Backus, is that he was much > concerned not to deprive 704 assembly-language programmers of > facilities they prized. His situation was very different from > ours today. He wanted to open up programming to others, but he > crucially needed to convince 704 assembly-language programmers of > the time---There were no others---that FORTRAN was not a > performance dog; and to this end he tried very hard to make > analogues of the crucial 704 machine instructions available in > FORTRAN.
Whereas nowadays IBM seem to add new instructions to support the programming languages!
