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A comment on Introducing Swift. Parent comment

Re:Introducing Swift by Someone on Monday June 02, 2014 @05:06PM (#7836385)
I agree with the first, but disagree with the second part:

COBOL, Fortran, JCL (not Turing complete, AFAIK), SQL, Excel, DOS batch files all were (fairly) mainstream at some time.

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Re:Introducing Swift by nl on Monday June 02, 2014 @07:31PM (#7837198)
Fortran came before Algol and arguably influenced it[1]. I agree with COBOL and SQL in particular, though.

[1] http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/Computer...

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Re:Introducing Swift by Someone on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @04:04AM (#7838644)
The correctness of that image can be discussed. Fortran was specified in 1954, but the first compiler shipped in April 1957 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#History). That is earlier than Algol 58 (first two implementations in 1958 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_58#Time_line_of_implement...), but close.

More importantly, "inspired by" does not imply that Fortran 58 is Algol-like (that same picture would declare Fortran Lisp-like, too)

For me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Simple_FORTRAN_II_progr... certainly is nothing like Algol.

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