- THE HISTORY OF FORTRAN I, II, AND III (computerhistory.org)
Before 1954 almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program. Much of their effort was devoted to overcoming the difficulties created by the computers of that era: the lack of index registers, the lack of built-in floating point operations, restricted instruction sets (which might have AND but not OR, for example), and primitive input-output arrangements. Given the nature of computers, the services which “automatic programming” performed for the programmer were concerned with overcoming the machine’s shortcomings. Thus the primary concern of some “automatic programming” systems was to allow the use of symbolic addresses and decimal numbers (e.g., the MIDAC Input Translation Program [Brown and Carr 1954]).
- Magical thinking (Wikipedia)
Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects. Examples include the idea that personal thoughts can influence the external world without acting on them, or that objects must be causally connected if they resemble each other or have come into contact with each other in the past. Magical thinking is a type of fallacious thinking and is a common source of invalid causal inferences. Unlike the confusion of correlation with causation, magical thinking does not require the events to be correlated.
Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN 77 abandoned the practice.
FORTRAN 77 4.0 Reference Manual
- Fortran (Wikipedia)
Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language designed for numeric computation and scientific computing.