[Info-vax] The (now lost) future of Alpha.

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 1 August 2018 21:48:01 UTC+1, Bob Koehler  wrote:
> In article <slrnpm3ts4.qdt.address at is.invalid>, invalid <address at is.invalid> writes:
> > 
> > No, it is not. It's a preprocessor written in PASCAL to add what K&R wanted
> > to FORTRAN.
> > 
> 
>    My copy of RATFOR is written in RATFOR and came with it's own FORTRAN
>    IV output of itself as a bootstrap.

Indeed. Here's the abstract of BW Kernighan's 1975 paper titled 
"RATFOR—a preprocessor for a rational fortran", published in 
"Software: Practice and Experience":

"Although Fortran is not a pleasant language to use, it does have the advantages of universality and (usually) relative efficiency. The RATFOR language attempts to conceal the main deficiencies of Fortran while retaining its desirable qualities, by providing decent control flow statements and some ‘syntactic sugar’. RATFOR is implemented as a preprocessor which translates this language into Fortran

Once the control flow and cosmetic deficiencies of Fortran are hidden, the resulting language is remarkably pleasant to use. RATFOR programs are markedly easier to write, and to read, and thus easier to debug, maintain and modify than their Fortran equivalents

It is readily possible to write RATFOR programs which are portable to other environments. RATFOR is written in itself in this way, so it is also portable; versions of RATFOR are now running on computers of six different manufacturers

This paper discusses design criteria for a Fortran preprocessor, the RATFOR language and its implementation, and user experience."

Add that to the distribution organisations of the time, e.g. 
the DECUS libraries and their contributors, and it wasn't a 
bad place to be, on PDP11s and elsewhere, though sometimes 
it was a bit short of marketing and sales opportunities by 
comparison with today's IT crowd.

For even more portability (from a different point of view) 
than RATFOR and friends, around that time there was also 
UCSD Pascal and the UCSD p-System (born 1978?), which in 
portability terms probably ran on more instruction set 
architectures than have ever run MS Windows (OK, that's
an easy target, but why not, in the circumstances).

The future's gonna be great, so many concepts to re-invent 
(or better still, just re-brand). Sometimes they might 
even be relevant to comp.os.vms, rather than just to 
Twitter or even The Register.