Post #563384
2026-03-07 02:32 UTC
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca
I still remember trying to teach my dad about recursion.
He was a research chemist. At some point he needed to do some hairy statistical computations that were a bit too much for the programmable calculators he had in his lab. Warner-Lambert research had just gotten some IBM mainframe -- this was early 1970s, and so he decided to learn FORTRAN -- and he became one of their local power-users.
Roughly in the same time-frame, 11-year-old me found a DEC-10 manual one of my brothers had brought home from college. It did languages.
Part 1 was FORTRAN.
Part 2 was Basic.
But it was last section of the book that was the acid trip.
Part 3 was about Algol.
4/n
Replies (1)
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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-07 02:34
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca This was post-Algol-68, but evidently the DEC folks were not happy with Algol-68 (I found out later *nobody* was happy with Algol-68), so ... various footnotes about where they deviated from the spec; not that I had any reason to care at that point. I encountered the recursive definition of factorial and I was like, "That can't possibly work." (the FORTRAN and Basic manuals were super clear about how each subprogram has its dedicated storage; you just *can't* *have* two instances active at the same time...) 5/n