3 ms·

There was no Fortran 80 standard. There was Fortran IV aka Fortran 66, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, and following, most recently Fortran 2018.

mumblemumble 5y ago
There wasn't a Fortran-80 standard, but there was a Fortran-80. Kind of like how there isn't a C# 2005 standard. That's a specific dialect of C# associated with a commercial compiler. The closest standard is the C# 4th edition ISO standard, which covers a subset of C# 2005's features. But it's still OK to refer to C# 2005 as a thing. I think that this is a useful distinction to make in Fortran-land. I haven't used any of these old Fortran compilers, but my understanding is that they were all significantly different and more-or-less mutually incompatible. The Fortran standard had a minimal standard library, so things like what functions you had available for string manipulation depended more on the compiler you used.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  Yes, FORTRAN-80 was a Microsoft product, belonging to a suite of compilers and interpreters (e.g. COBOL-80, BASIC-80, etc.) for the operating system CP/M and for CPUs compatible with Intel 8080, e.g. Zilog Z80. These were the main Microsoft products before its involvement with MS-DOS. I have used FORTRAN-80 quite a lot, before being able to use an IBM PC compatible computer. An 8080 or Z80 was able to do only about 100 (@ 2 MHz) to 200 (@ 4 MHz) double-precision floating-point operations per second. When I was able to use for the first-time a PC/AT with an 80386DX @ 25 MHz with coprocessor, which could do 100 thousand such operations per second, I recompiled an older FORTRAN-80 program and its run time dropped from 1 hour on CP/M to a few seconds on the PC/AT. Obviously I was very impressed.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Kind of like how there isn't a C# 2005 standard Er... no. There is: it's just that C# stopped being published as an ISO Standard after version 2.0, and MS stopped publishing C# as an ECMA Standard a few years ago, but the C# language still has specifications and those specifications have version numbers - and those version numbers are used as compiler flags: `csc /langversion:7.3`, for example. > But it's still OK to refer to C# 2005 as a thing. "C# 2005" was C# 2.0, the last version with an ISO spec. Currently we're on C# 9.0 in .NET 6. C# language spec versions and .NET releases are tied together as new language features have dependencies on BCL features (e.g. C# 8.0's `foreach-await` requires `IAsyncEnumerable` which was added in .NET Core 3: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2019/november/csharp-iterating-with-async-enumerables-in-csharp-8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2019/... That said, the C# language does enjoy relatively good evolution and progress that's almost as rapid as Swift's, and unlike, say, Java, which feels to me like it's progressing at half the speed of C#.

mumblemumble 5y ago

There wasn't a Fortran-80 standard, but there was a Fortran-80. Kind of like how there isn't a C# 2005 standard. That's a specific dialect of C# associated with a commercial compiler. The closest standard is the C# 4th edition ISO standard, which covers a subset of C# 2005's features. But it's still OK to refer to C# 2005 as a thing. I think that this is a useful distinction to make in Fortran-land. I haven't used any of these old Fortran compilers, but my understanding is that they were all significantly different and more-or-less mutually incompatible. The Fortran standard had a minimal standard library, so things like what functions you had available for string manipulation depended more on the compiler you used.

adrian_b 5y ago
Yes, FORTRAN-80 was a Microsoft product, belonging to a suite of compilers and interpreters (e.g. COBOL-80, BASIC-80, etc.) for the operating system CP/M and for CPUs compatible with Intel 8080, e.g. Zilog Z80. These were the main Microsoft products before its involvement with MS-DOS. I have used FORTRAN-80 quite a lot, before being able to use an IBM PC compatible computer. An 8080 or Z80 was able to do only about 100 (@ 2 MHz) to 200 (@ 4 MHz) double-precision floating-point operations per second. When I was able to use for the first-time a PC/AT with an 80386DX @ 25 MHz with coprocessor, which could do 100 thousand such operations per second, I recompiled an older FORTRAN-80 program and its run time dropped from 1 hour on CP/M to a few seconds on the PC/AT. Obviously I was very impressed.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Kind of like how there isn't a C# 2005 standard Er... no. There is: it's just that C# stopped being published as an ISO Standard after version 2.0, and MS stopped publishing C# as an ECMA Standard a few years ago, but the C# language still has specifications and those specifications have version numbers - and those version numbers are used as compiler flags: `csc /langversion:7.3`, for example. > But it's still OK to refer to C# 2005 as a thing. "C# 2005" was C# 2.0, the last version with an ISO spec. Currently we're on C# 9.0 in .NET 6. C# language spec versions and .NET releases are tied together as new language features have dependencies on BCL features (e.g. C# 8.0's `foreach-await` requires `IAsyncEnumerable` which was added in .NET Core 3: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2019/november/csharp-iterating-with-async-enumerables-in-csharp-8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2019/... That said, the C# language does enjoy relatively good evolution and progress that's almost as rapid as Swift's, and unlike, say, Java, which feels to me like it's progressing at half the speed of C#.