Rational Fortran

RationalFortran? (RATFOR) = FortranLanguage with block-structured syntax, like CeeLanguage.

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In 1976 Kernighan [BrianKernighan] and Plauger [PjPlauger] introduced their seminal book on software engineering, Software Tools.

At the time, the C programming language was in use at Bell Laboratories and at a few Universities. Wide acceptance of C was still a decade away. So the authors choose to use FORTRAN as their language of choice to make the book more marketable. However, FORTRAN (IV) had some well-known deficiencies with respect to control and data structures. To help alleviate this problem, the authors created a preprocessor for FORTRAN that added many of C's control structures to the FORTRAN language. They named this preprocessor RATFOR (for RATional FORtran). RATFOR modernized FORTRAN's control structures and made it possible to write a realistic text on software engineering."

• http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/prof/gee/rat/paper_html/node1.html = RATional FORtran == Ratfor90
• http://web.stanford.edu/class/me200c/tutorial_77/18_num_soft.html

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There was a contemporary of ratfor called flecs, which also gave a structure to fortran via a PreCompiler.

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CategoryFortran CategoryProgrammingLanguage