I *think* FORMAC was an IBM product. If it's the same thing I'm thinking
of, I discovered in college that it was installed on our system and I
played with it once in a while. It would also evaluate formulas
symbolically and print equations in a format roughly similar to a
hand-written style. However, since this was line-printer output rather
than APA output, the results were sometimes a little difficult to read.
For example,
2 2
cos x + sin x = 1
or
inf
---
\ -x
/ 2 = 1
---
x=1
These examples may not actually have been manipulable by FORMAC (it's been
30 years since I used it), but serve only to represent the type of symbolic
output that it generated.
- mb
IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> wrote on
01/17/2014 10:46:53 AM:
> From: DASDBILL2 <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected],
> Date: 01/17/2014 10:49 AM
> Subject: Re: Carmine Cannatello's book
> Sent by: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]>
>
> I don't remember who developed it. Here is all I could find:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORMAC_(programming_language )
> Bill Fairchild
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From: "Scott Ford" <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 9:28:54 AM
> Subject: Re: Carmine Cannatello's book
>
> Bill,
>
> Who makes FORMAC ? Haven't heard of that one.
>
> Scott ford
> www.identityforge.com
> from my IPAD
>
>
>
>
> > On Jan 17, 2014, at 9:49 AM, DASDBILL2 <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > I had two months with ALGOL 60, two months with FORTRAN, then 48
> years with Assembler punctuated by one day with FORMAC and one day
> with RPG. FORMAC was a cool superset of PL/1 that supported
> variables with thousands of decimal places of accuracy.
> > Bill Fairchild
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >
> > From: "Tim Lost" <[email protected]>
> > To: [email protected]
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 6:15:05 PM
> > Subject: Re: Carmine Cannatello's book
> >
> > Same here, Computer Ops, Production control and then into System Admin.
I
> > say admin because I don't actually code anything. Just JCL, SMP/e and
some
> > rexx. Maybe one day I can count myself among the few and chosen true
> > Sysprogs :-p
> >
> >
> >> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 5:46 PM, Scott Ford
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> Operations into systems programming
> >>
> >> Scott ford
> >> www.identityforge.com
> >> from my IPAD
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>> On Jan 15, 2014, at 5:53 PM, Gord Tomlin <
> >>> [email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 2014-01-15 17:17, Tony Thigpen wrote:
> >>>> (Most Mainframe assembler programmers did time as a COBOL
programmer.)
> >>>
> >>> Interesting assertion. The majority of systems programmers I know did
> >>> not come from an applications programming background. Personally,
I've
> >>> only written one COBOL program since university, which means it's the
> >>> only one I wrote without using a keypunch.
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>>
> >>> Regards, Gord Tomlin
> >>> Action Software International
> >>> (a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
> >>> Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507
> >>
>
