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I think the reason for the absence of good string handling in Fortran was that strings are rarely (if ever) used in mathematical formulas.
by Koshkin 5y ago
I think the reason for the absence of good string handling in Fortran was that strings are rarely (if ever) used in mathematical formulas.
- jhallenworld 5y agoTrue, but there was a time when FORTRAN was the most portable language, which meant that it certainly did get use beyond math. I've seen compilers and assemblers distributed as FORTRAN source.
- sekia 5y agoAnd writing encoding-agnostic string library is harder than we think, I guess. Notice that the first release of FORTRAN I is earlier than standardization of ASCII. FORTRAN was initially born for IBM 704 then ported to huge variety of machine architectures. So there's no guarantee on internal string representation; It might be EBCDIC, ASCII, or other ancient, machine specific encodings.