Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by greglindahl on Sunday June 04, 2017 @03:06PM
(#14482963)
Since Fortran had a large amount of existing code soon after it was invented, the standards committee has always tended to add new features to Fortran after other languages had already tried them out and perhaps discovered pitfalls.
From my experience working on compilers, the thing Fortran begat the most was advanced compiler optimization algorithms, which then trickled down into C and C++.
That's true for COBOL too.
FORTRAN compilers were great for loop optimizations, but not clear if it pioneered much else worthwhile.
Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by willtim on Sunday June 04, 2017 @04:01PM
(#14483213)
FORTRAN pioneered expressions which were used in addition to statements. This was huge. Modern languages are still expanding on the idea of programming with expressions (especially functional languages).
Re:Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
by jhbadger on Sunday June 04, 2017 @03:22PM
(#14483048)
BASIC was clearly begat by FORTRAN. This is easier to see in the 1960s versions of both languages, which used line numbers and GOTO statements for program flow, although later versions of both FORTRAN and BASIC borrowed structured programming elements from the ALGOL family.
Which programming language was begat by FORTRAN
Fortran->Matlab->Julia is a pretty obvious family tree. Much of how numpy and similar libraries do numerics is also quite obviously influenced by Matlab (and thus Fortran).
Which programming language was begat by FORTRAN? The ALGOL family seems rather independent to me.
Both FORTRAN and COBOL had the misfortune to be created before structured programming. Others, like FORTH and LISP were lucky that they are flexible enough to easily add new programming conventions.
You could probably say that modern report generators were begat by COBOL to some degree (even though FORTRAN had formatted output too)
It seems programming languages designed to be "easy to use" suffer from lots of people writing really terrible code with it. Excel or VB have similar issues.