City University Conversational Fortran(ID:8491/)

from Barron 1971
"A few years ago a FORTRAN system was developed for student work at The City University: in order to achieve good diagnostics this system employed many of the techniques outlined in this paper, although it was intended for batch use. Unfortunately, no description of this significant piece of work was published at the time."
References:
  • Barron, DW "Approaches to conversation FORTRAN" pp123-127 view details Abstract: This paper defines the term 'conversational programming system' in a pragmatic way by considering the facilities that the user expects to see in such a system. The difficulties of implementation are discussed, in the context of developing an outline design for a conversational FORTRAN system that makes a reasonable compromise between flexibility and efficiency. Extract: Introduction
    Introduction
    Conversational programming systems are enjoying a great
    vogue at present. Commercial time-sharing services are doing
    good business, and following the success of systems such as
    BASIC and of JOSS (alias TELCOMP alias JEAN) 'conversational
    FORTRAN' and 'conversational ALGOL' are being
    offered. However, these terms are not particularly well defined.
    Very often, all that is provided is a simple editing facility for
    source programs and an ability to communicate with the teleprinter
    at run-time, coupled to a more-or-less standard 'batch'
    compiler. (In one system of the author's acquaintance, the user
    of the conversational FORTRAN system is required to type
    his program as formatted card images, without the benefit of
    a TAB mechanism.)
    Another term that is used in this connection is 'incremental
    compiling', again, often without a clear definition. In this paper
    we aim to define the term 'conversational programming system'
    in a pragmatic way by considering the facilities that the user
    might expect to see. We then discuss various ways of achieving
    this for a FORTRAN-like language, including incremental
    compilation, and suggest a system that combines the external
    features that the programmer wants with reasonable internal
    efficiency. (As will be seen, this does not necessarily imply a
    fully interactive compiler.) Extract: City Conversational FORTRAN
    A few years ago a FORTRAN system was developed for student work at The City University: in order to achieve good diagnostics this system employed many of the techniques outlined in this paper, although it was intended for batch use. Unfortunately, no description of this significant piece of work was published at the time.
          in The Computer Journal 14(1) 1971 view details