Re: The actual quote from the Post AAS article

[mshapiro@netlink.cts.com (Michael Shapiro)]

berman@umbc.edu (Mike Berman) writes:

> If I remember my chronology correctly, the state-of-the-art in software
> engineering awareness has matured along with its practice. When FORATRAN
> was developed, it was considered by many to be a high level
> _specification language_ which, relative to the machine and assembly
> code programming of the day, it was. By today's standards of reuse and
> portability, FORTRAN programs from two or three decades ago are
> considered rather low level programming (low level meaning
> application/machine dependent, not any kind of quality statement).

I seem to recall Backus, in a talk, pointing out that FORTRAN was an 
experiment aimed at proving that you could write in a "higher level 
language" (I think the term may have come later) and get as good code out 
as an experienced assembly-language programmer could produce ... or maybe 
better.  That was the reason the early FORTRAN has a FREQUENCY statement, 
so you could tell the compiler which order to test multiway branching, 
for example.

This discussion does bring up one of the points I make from time to time, 
the observation is the only "high order" language around.  All the others
are "high level" languages.  I have the feeling that this arbitrary 
change of nomenclature (seemingly traced back to the HOLWG) gives people 
the feeling that the DoD doesn't really want Ada to fit in with the 
community of programming languages.


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