What Was Your First Programming Language?

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-05-2015 06:34 AM)Les Bell Wrote:  [The first was Algol 60, at school in 1972.

I never really used Algol. I did get exposed to Algol-68 on a Burroughs computer in 1979. We had bought 60 NOAA weather station data tapes. These were TRY tapes (Test Reference Year) for 60 major US cities. They contained hourly data for a year of weather. These tapes were copies of the same weather data that was available on 80 column punch cards. Since the punch cards were limited to 80 positions, the cards were "over punched" to include 140 characters of data. One of my co-workers wrote a neat Algol program that would read the data, scan it and then expand it to the 140 characters of data.

I seem to remember that he used a "scan-replace" programming statement to do this and I remember how impressed I was that such a small, simple program could do the data expansion. Not sure if I'm remembering the correct programming statement (scan-replace) or not but it was something similar to that. If I remember correctly, the statement would scan an array left to right and then act on it storing the results in the larger array.

Bill
Smithville, NJ