FORMAC, of which there are both FORTRAN and PL/I versions, is the work of Jean Sammet and an IBM group working under her. My copy of the original FORTRAN documentation is dated 1962, but much more work was done later.
FORMAC, along with some LISP-based formula-manipulation packages, is still in significant use in milieux remote from IBM-MAIN. Bill's mention of FORMAC's multiple-precision facilities was an apt one. They are incidental but important, a saner predecessor of ALGOL 68's long long long . . . long construct, which exhausted storage in the process of attempting to construct the longest possible instance of some arithmetic data type. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
