I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.
Goes the other way too. I misidentified Fortran of all things because their dialect is far too new compared to what I remember (more than) a quarter century ago.
That made me chuckle, I still work on Fortran applications. Some were written in the 70s/80s, but maybe that just means the industries I've worked in are a bit _inflexible_?
In 1982, I knew of someone at a university who was working on the Fortran 8x specification that became Fortran 90. I don't remember it being thought of as old-fashioned, maybe just less of a general purpose language than in earlier years.
Possibly. The last versions I used were Fortran 90 and 95, which were quite frankly an insult to the 40 or so years of programming language design research and practice leading up to it.
> Fortran has seen major changes over the 64 years it's been in use.
And yet most Fortran programmers reject/ignore those changes and stick to Fortran 77. When I was in academia, I couldn't find a single person writing Fortran code in anything newer than 77.
It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later and never wrote fixed format Fortran would be pretty lost if they had to work on F77 or, Backus forbid, F66. C, on the other hand, has changed much less, beyond the ANSI function declarations. I first used the C version that was in 6th Edition AT&T UNIX and that had some features that would look strange to modern users, such as initializers not using = signs:
int i 4;
and the assignment operators being the other way round:
a =+ 2;
The point is, when discussing the age of a language, how important is the degree of change over time? At what point is it a new language? The same is true of human languages. I can understand Shakespeare with little trouble, but I miss some points unless there are footnotes. I can get a bit of Chaucer, but far from full comprehension. Beowulf? Not a prayer. But it's all "English"...
I can remember my mom telling me, sometime in the late 70s or very early 80s, that she thought the new version of Fortran was an improvement because it had `else`.
I guess the Fortran programmers from 1960 might be at least somewhat familiar with Fortran 2008, but I suspect the gulf would be wider than a spoken language change. If I watch an episode of the honeymooners, the parts I don't understand are cultural, not linguistic.
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