4 ms·
Fortran has never been used seriously for systems programming. It got text processing capabilities and a ton of other stuff, but we do not see operating systems
by yiyus 5y ago
Fortran has never been used seriously for systems programming. It got text processing capabilities and a ton of other stuff, but we do not see operating systems or web servers written in Fortran.
And C got the floating point operations B did not have, and was actually used for lots of numerical work for a while (and it still is, up to some point), but nobody was totally happy with it so we got C++, new Fortran versions, Python, now Julia... Although it always is an option due to the availability and quality of C compilers, I would not say that C succeeded in becoming the language of choice for scientific computing.
Of course, this does not mean that C or Fortran are failures.
- jecel 5y agoThere was at least one operating system programmed in Fortran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS
- yiyus 5y agoThanks for the info. I did not know this, but it does not surprise me. I am sure there are similar examples. The first section of the linked article says that Fortran "was an odd choice from a pure computer science standpoint", that they "developed hardware optimized to run FORTRAN", and that large parts of the OS (in particular, the kernel) were eventually rewritten in other languages. This is, in my opinion, a great example of how Fortran could not compete with C as a systems programming language.
- theodorethomas 5y agoFortran is not designed to be a systems programming language and you can tell because it lacks the concept of memory address (hardware has been designed to operate by flipping bits at memory addresses for longer than I can remember). Fortran is a higher level language for describing computations on data.
- yiyus 5y agoNo. It is not. Read the thread. And read the submitted article.
- TheRealKing 5y agoFortran is NOT a systems programming language. It is a niche language for scientific computing and why it is called (mathematical) Formula Translator (a.k.a Fortran).
- yiyus 5y agoWhat is your point? Did you read the thread?
- coldtea 5y agoThere's probably one written in Brainfuck too, doesn't mean it matters in the grand scheme of things though. So, "at least one operating system programmed in Fortran" doesn't counter "Fortran hasn't been really used for systems programming", if that operating system is some irrelevant research project, or (as in here) a commercial niche system, that maybe ever reached 0.00001% of the OS users space.