Thanks for mentioning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM

A joke in 1973 -- kind of a reality with the exceptions. As early as FORTRAN IV, IO operations errors were handled in higher level programming languages:

  WRITE( 6, 30, ERR=390 ) 

specified that error handling for that given write operation was behind the label 390.

The march of progress, just like even the first FORTRAN circa 1956 did

     WRITE (6, 150) X
 150 FORMAT (F10.2)

But C++ since 1988 improved it with

  cout << setw(10) << setprecision(2) << showpoint << x;

or Java 1996 with:

    java.text.NumberFormat formatter = 
         java.text.NumberFormat.getNumberInstance(); 
    formatter.setMinimumFractionDigits(2); 
    formatter.setMaximumFractionDigits(2); 
    String s = formatter.format(x); 
    for (int i = s.length(); i < 10; i++) 
         System.out.print(' '); 
    System.out.print(s);

The march of progress.