Re: Public disclosure of discovered vulnerabilities

>>> The FORMAT statement was interpreted at run time - that is a big 

Even the late-70s/early-80s DEC FORTRAN compiler only did run-time inter-
pretation of format strings if it needed, i.e., if you used a string variabl
e
as a format statement. Isn't that an F77 feature, anyway?

For compile-time format strings, the compiler actually generated a series
of calls, with pre-compiled arguments, to the RTL to execute the format.
No interpretation in sight. When a run-time format was executed, there was
a single call to the interpretation routine, and then a series of calls to
execute it. Because the I/O list is always known at compile time, this list
of calls was definable at compile time in any case.

Compared to what was state of the art at the time in (s)printf, Fortran
format statements are a model of efficiency. How many C compilers, even
today, translate an sprintf call into a series of primitive string operation
s
instead of calling the full format interpreter?

> Modern FORTRAN is very different from the FORTRAN 4 of 1966.
> A lot of improvements have been made since the 1950s when FORTRAN
> was invented.  Early FORTRAN was however C's competitor.

'scuse me? C had any comparable "market penetration" relative to Forrtan
before F77 came about? Or, indeed, in the time frame of F66?!

Jan

In article <3g0i4lF9rjmnU1@individual.net>,
Jan Vorbrüggen  <jvorbrueggen-not@mediasec.de> wrote:
>
>'scuse me? C had any comparable "market penetration" relative to Forrtan
>before F77 came about? Or, indeed, in the time frame of F66?!

C became popular because affordable mini/microcomputers ran UNIX.
Considering the timeframe for the invention and availability of C
outside Bell Labs, it's sort of hard to envision how it might have
competed with Fortran prior to F77, especially considering that
IIRC UNIX also shipped with a Fortran compiler.