From: tkoenig@netcologne.de   
      
   Lawrence D'Oliveiro  schrieb:   
   > On Thu, 25 Jan 2024 15:31:51 -0600, Lynn McGuire wrote:   
   >   
   >> Much Fortran code was written under the F66 rules until the late 1980s   
   >> if you supported multiple platforms (we supported ten platforms in the   
   >> 1980s).   
   >   
   > Why did it take vendors so long to catch up to FORTRAN 77?   
      
   Bell Labs Fortran f77 appeared in August 1978, can't get much   
   faster than that.   
      
   At bitsavers, I find a manuals for VS Fortran which mention a   
   first release in February 1981.   
      
   A Cray manual from 1984 (SR-0009J_CFT_Reference_Dec84.pdf) mentiones   
   Fortran 77 compliance for August 1981.   
      
   Steve Lionel already reported about VAX Fortran in 1980.   
      
   > By the way, I thought the limit on identifier length had been lifted in   
   > FORTRAN 77, but I was wrong: it took until Fortran 90 to raise the limit   
   > to 31.   
      
   It was just a very commen extension, and would bite you if you   
   used, for example, a Fujitsu compiler, which still enforced it,   
   after doing development on VS Fortran...   
      
   Where Fortran really lost out was in the decade+ between the FORTRAN   
   77 and Fortran 90.  C was gaining traction, and scientists and   
   engineers learned about the benefits of dynamic memory allocation   
   and structs.   
      
   Fortran 90 where it went wrong - standard was very late, the   
   implementations came late (with the exception of NAG, which was   
   very fast), and g77 (which was part of the gcc suite) was F77.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)