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A comment on Why Fortran?. Parent comment

Re:Why Fortran? by tsimionescu on Monday November 07, 2022 @03:37AM (#33502947)
Various LISPs were a major contender in those times, with various companies selling their own flavors. LISP was the major high-level programming language used for writing operating systems - before C, other OSs were basically written in assembler (though there was at least one written in COBOL, BLIS/COBOL, which seems to have been more or less contemporaneous with C's early life).

FORTRAN was always dedicated to scientific computing, I don't believe it was ever used for system software, so it is a bit apples-to-oranges.

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Re:Why Fortran? by skissane on Monday November 07, 2022 @03:45AM (#33503025)
> FORTRAN was always dedicated to scientific computing, I don't believe it was ever used for system software, so it is a bit apples-to-oranges.

Early versions of PRIMOS used FORTRAN as a systems programming language, although later versions switched to Prime's proprietary PL/I dialect (PL/P) and Modula 2.

The reason for the somewhat unusual choice of FORTRAN as a systems programming language? Prime's founders were experienced FORTRAN programmers, so it was the natural choice for them, and in 1972 alternatives were far less established (C was only just being invented)

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Re:Why Fortran? by rjsw on Monday November 07, 2022 @07:18AM (#33504857)
I think PL/I has more of a claim to have been used for writing operating systems before C than Lisp.
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