Re: Language on the GE-225? [Was: Slashdot/Wired article on May 1st in Basic history]
by Happy Trails <nomail@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
May 9, 2008 at 10:45 PM
On Fri, 09 May 2008 13:57:06 GMT, ppnerkDELETETHIS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Phred)
(or some bottom-poster) wrote:
>>One of the things that I liked
>>about BASIC was that it could do everything that FORTRAN could do plus
>>it could handle text. Although you could handle text in FORTRAN IV it
>>wasn't easy.
I programmed in Fortran 4 on IBM 360 mainframes in 68-70 doing
actuarial work for an insurance company. I used F4 to format and
typeset the actual pages that made up the agents rate books for the
various policies we sold. Without using any whiteout, hahaha.
If you think you are a good programmer, try doing that.
The hard part was to get it to print nothing instead of "0.0" when you
had a zero value in a column, and not screw up the line/column
spacing.
After a while it got pretty easy to do any kind of formatted page.
