Talk:WATFIV (programming language)

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Contents 1 No New Compilers ??? 2 Open WATCOM FORTRAN-77 3 Original research 3.1 One reference, lots more available if you really want them

[edit] No New Compilers ???

See: Open Watcom. So there is more wrong than just "No new compilers"; need to link the continuing history. Why not merge, leaving only a stubb in Wikipedia? Rwwww 05:47, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Open WATCOM FORTRAN-77

> "no new WATFOR-like FORTRAN compilers have been developed"

Open WATCOM FORTRAN-77 is the continued development of the WATCOM FORTRAN-77 compiler, a traditional optimizing compiler. No one is saying that development of this compiler is not continuing.

No new WATFOR-like compilers have been developed. WATFOR-like implies a number of things, chief of which is its ability to compile/link/execute on the fly. Turbo Pascal was a Pascal compiler that had "WATFOR-like" characteristics. But that was a Pascal compiler, not a FORTRAN compiler. If someone knows of the recent development of a new WATFOR-like FORTRAN compiler, please let us know.

Watcom's WATFOR-77 compiler has not been open-sourced.

[edit] Original research

"The source of this is personal experience." – Reporting personal experience is clearly original research (see WP:NOR). A large part of this article is a personal interpretation of using WATFIV. In particular, the assertions about WATFIV's uses in debugging should be sourced. John FitzGerald 20:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

In fact. there are many questionable, unsourced assertions in the article, such as "Non-experienced programmers could be taught programming at minimal cost in time and computing resources." John FitzGerald 20:58, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Since you're not supposed to have multiple templates on an article, I chose the NOR template as the one which best described the problems with the article. John FitzGerald 15:06, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] One reference, lots more available if you really want them

From: http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/40th/Chronology/1965.shtml

By November 1965, five Canadian schools, eleven American installations and one in Switzerland had requested a copy of WATFOR. By June of 1966, requests were received from an additional two Canadian locations, thirty-six American, and six international installations The WATFOR compiler was acknowledged to have increased the computing capacity at the university by 5 times, thereby saving the university dollars in hardware and software upgrades that most certainly would have been required to provide necessary computing service.

-- and --

The original WATFOR compiler for the FORTRAN IV computer language for the IBM 7040 computer had diagnostic capabilities superior to most of its contemporary counterparts so that users could find and correct errors. The program greatly expanded the potential for using computers in undergraduate instruction and it put the fledgling university on the map internationally.

 -- and from:  http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/40th/Chronology/1967.shtml --

WATFOR 360 was developed in 1967 and it greatly enhanced the speed and ease of use of the IBM 360 series of computers. The program was essentially WATFOR for the IBM 360 series, the latest in computing technology at the time. It was also the early student-friendly variant of FORTRAN IV. The group leaders of the team that created the compiler, Paul Dirksen and Paul Cress, won the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1972 for their efforts. In 1973, WATFIV was augmented with structured programming constructs and character variables to create WATFIV/S.

When Cress and Dirksen completed their work on the WATFOR 360 compiler, the program increased the performance of the machine to the point where it could compile and execute a 45 card job in under 10 seconds. Comparable programs took some 13 minutes to execute the same job. The WATFOR 360 compiler became the basis for the world-famous WATFIV program

For full the article, please see: UW Special Collections. GA 133-57. Wes Graham Fonds. Series 1.2: Biographical: Articles. John Helliwell, PC 4, no. 7 (April 2, 1985), 204-209, ill.

 --

I invite you to read the WATFOR/WATFIV/WATFIV-S articles in the subsequent years' chronology. And the author of the books cited below, Prof Ken McLaughlin was the principal author of the chronology excerpted above (which was a commissioned online-only work created for the 40th Anniversary of the School of Computer Science).

For hard-copy verification, see:

Ken McLaughlin; Waterloo: The Unconventional Founding of an Unconventional University; UW Press 1997

Ken Mclaughlin; Out of the Shadow of Orthodoxy: Waterloo @ 50; UW press 2007

-- Trevor Grove, UW  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.97.176.165 (talk) 23:31, 23 November 2007 (UTC)