On 4/5/25 07:03, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > I never thought of Fortran of being portable by design. It may > be fairly portable just because of the simplicity of the language. > I'll let you know, I am about to try moving a program that ran on > TOPS-10 and IBM MTS to Microsoft Fortran-80. :-)
I did something similar some 50 years ago. Took the PDP-10 "Colossal Cave/Adventure" source to CDC 6000 FORTRAN running under SCOPE. The part that involved the most labor was conversion of the source code tape that used the TOPS-10 convention of 5 7-bit ASCII in a 36 bit word to CDC 6 bit Display code. Conversion of the FORTRAN dialect was fairly trivial; the most effort involved re-implementing the SAVE command (CDC SCOPE did not have a simple method for saving core images and restarting them). The result ran almost from the first try. > The truly portable language was COBOL. :-) 50 years ago, COBOL (and FORTRAN) standardization was a loose affair. Many smaller systems simply lacked COBOL (was there a 1401 COBOL?). Language features were removed as the machine architecture dictated. For example, contrast 1960s IBM S/360 USA "BASIC" FORTRAN with, say UNIVAC 1108 FORTRAN-V. Going from the small (no logical IF, etc.) IBM dialect to the UNIVAC one would have been pretty simple; the other direction, not so much. I recall that DOS/360 COBOL as released lacked ISAM--the statements could be compiled, but no code was generated. Instead, IBM provided a bunch of library routines that were invoked with the "ENTER LINKAGE" statement. --Chuck --Chuck
