Oleg Kobchenko wrote: > It's an interesting observation that the bulk array > handling originated with the read operation. > > Another very prominent technolgy, the object oriented programming, > also drove the insight for one of its priciples--encapsulation (hiding > of data and association with functions) with a read operation on > an ancient machine B220 without an file operating system, so > tape was divided into three regions: data, functions knowing to > operate of this data and a pointer table. The latter is the prototype > of the vtable, of course. > > http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html > > >
Very interesting link. By the way, you can get the original FORTRAN manual at http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/history/ Input is more complicated than we realize, and there have been any number of ingenious solutions and disasters. In the latter category is Pascal's record-oriented I/O, developed on the assumption that all input was available (e.g. on cards) and programs were run as batch jobs. This did not adapt well to interactive I/O where without care the computer would be waiting for a response before it would type a promnpt. Best wishes, John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
