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FORTRAN77 only allowed 5-digit numbers as labels. So people developed habits for numbering loops & ifs. Programs definitely lost readability if you renumbered t
by tlb 3y ago
FORTRAN77 only allowed 5-digit numbers as labels. So people developed habits for numbering loops & ifs. Programs definitely lost readability if you renumbered them.
The labels were in fact numbers, not just numeric strings, since there was a computed GOTO that took an expression to jump to.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI'm pretty sure back then number labels didn't seem any worse than the memory addresses one would use in machine code. I wonder what aspect of coding today will seem to coders a half-century from now to have been not, sympathy for the machine, but excessive kowtowing towards it? (I would suggest order-dependent alternative trees, but Hope provides an example of starting with order independence and subsequently reverting to what programmers traditionally expect)
- qingcharles 3y agoBut was anyone actually coding in machine code without an assembler? At least an assembler lets you set strings for all your jump points...
- 082349872349872 3y agoGood point; looking at MIXAL (ca.1968?) it looks like local symbols are single digit but global symbols are up to 10 character alphanumeric.
- jeffrallen 3y agoComputed GOTO was tricky, but not as bad as a computed COMEFROM.