Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 21:23:34 02/05/04
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On February 05, 2004 at 21:01:52, Christophe Theron wrote: >On February 05, 2004 at 14:57:32, Bob Durrett wrote: > >> >>Quote from an MSNBC article: >> >>Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (formula translation), the >>original “high-level” programming language, would seem to be the infotech >>equivalent of cuneiform. But it’s still widely used, especially in scientific >>computing. Why has this Eisenhower-era veteran outlasted so many hardware and >>software generations? “It’s partly the learning curve,” says Hewlett-Packard >>Laboratories’ Hans Boehm, former chair of the Association for Computing >>Research’s special-interest group on programming languages. “For some people >>it’s good enough, and it’s hard to let go of something once you learn it.” >>Adaptability and compatibility, which made Fortran the programmers’ lingua >>franca in the 1960s and ’70s, are also key to its viability. Major upgrades have >>boosted efficiency and added features while preserving old versions intact. So a >>vast number of tried-and-true Fortran 77 programs jibe with the current Fortran >>90. Microsoft, take note. >> >>Maybe chess programmers are missing out on the best language of all! >> >>Bob D. > > > >"Chess", the mythical chess program of the '70 programmed by Slate and Atkins, >was programmed in Fortran. > >I think it was a bitboard program. > >Bob will tell me if the above is incorrect (most probably it is incomplete). > > :) Close. Chess through chess 3 was written in Fortran. Chess 4.0 was written in pure CDC assembly language, although they did a lot like I did in Crafty and used lots of macros to hide much of the ugly details. I had a copy of their code for a long time as Harry and I used it as a sparring partner many times as we worked on making Cray Blitz faster... Chess 4 was their first bitboard program. Slate later wrote a program that he originally called chess 5 (this was written without Larry Atkin) but he later chose to call it "NuChess" instead. It was once again written in Fortran for portability as I made arrangements for him to use a Cray just like we were using, at a couple of ACM events. So perhaps you were right after all, although I suspect you were talking about "the big mama" chess 4.x that beat most everything around. It was, as I said, written in "Compass" which was CDC asm. Of course you could claim you were talking about the last "chess" program and then you are 100% right. :) > > Christophe
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