On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 14:46:28 -0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> declaimed the following:
>On 2021-09-08, charles hottel <chot...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> So what do yoy think or feel about a language like RATFOR (Rational
>> FORTRAN) which was implemented as macros? Should they instead have
>> simply adapted themselves to FORTRAN?
>
>That's an interesting question. If the langauge is complete,
>well-defined, and well-documented then it's not that much different
>than any other source language than gets translated into a lower level
>language (e.g. C -> assembly). My recollection of RATFOR was that it
>provided enough signifcant "features" that weren't available in the
>underlying FORTRAN to make it worthwhile.
>
Primarily providing block structured IF/ELSE and loops -- in a language
that only really provided IF/GOTO...
My college tried using one of these (for some reason the name TextFOR
sticks with me)... The experiment only lasted one term. The preprocessor
ate CPU and I/O time -- with the result that the FORTRAN class used two or
three times the times of the COBOL class! (The native compilers were
designed as re-entrant, allowing multiple compiles to share one in-core
image; the preprocessor no doubt ran as one image per compile, triggering
lots of page swapping to disk)
--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfr...@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/
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