the meaning of r?.......ï¾

[Robert Miles]

On 7/23/2012 1:10 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:42:51 +0200, Henrik Faber <hfaber at invalid.net>
> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>
>>
>> If that was written by my coworkers, I'd strangle them.
>>
> 	My first real assignment, 31 years ago, was porting an application
> to CDC MP-60 FORTRAN (what I called "FORTRAN MINUS TWO"). This was a
> minimal FORTRAN implementation in which one could not do things like:
>
> 	ix = 20
> 	call xyz(ix, ix+2, ix-2)
>
> forcing us to produce such abominations as
>
> 	ix = 20
>
> 	jinx = ix + 2
> 	minx = ix - 2
>
> 	call xyz(ix, jinx, minx)
>

One of my first jobs involved helping maintain a Fortran program
originally written for an early IBM 360 with only 64 kilobytes
of memory.  It included an assembler routine to do double precision
floating point (that early computer couldn't do it as hardware
instructions) and another assembler routine to do dynamic overlays -
load one more subroutine into memory just before calling it (and
then usually overwriting it with the next subroutine to be called
after finishing the first one).  Originally, the computer operators
had to reload the operating system when this program finished,
because it had to overwrite the operating system in order to have
enough memory to run.

When I worked on it, it ran under IBM's DOS (for mainframes).
I never saw any attempts to make it run under Microsoft's DOS
(for microcomputers).