Over 65 years ago this month, researchers ran the first FORTRAN program
This is considered as the beginning of general-purpose programming. ( Image credits : NASA and MIT_CSAIL )
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That was a mistake even back then
Fortran was actually a pretty solid language, and I actually regularly use programs that still have pieces written in Fortran.
Out of curiosity, is a FORTRAN compiler at all self-bootsrapping in a manner akin to Forth? That is, you define a few primitives and then define the rest of the language in terms of those primitives?
You don't really change the compiler itself. You can build up libraries of your own subroutines and link in the ones you need in any particular program, just like you might in C.
No. Not even close. It's more like a sequence of assignment and conditional statements.