[ch] early FORTRAN compiler anecdote

David Furcy furcyd at uwosh.edu
Fri Sep 8 11:26:35 PDT 2006


I recently joined this list and have not seen any traffic yet... I'll try this anyway.
Someone mentioned to me the other day a story about how an early FORTRAN compiler was used to compile a program that was executed on a space probe with dire consequences due to ambiguities at the lexer level in a "do loop" (the anecdote went like this: "you see, back then white space was not used as a token separator, etc.) Obviously, I am short on details here. Can anybody help me fill them in with some good references? thanks in advance,

David

--
Dr. David Furcy, Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department               
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
furcyd at uwosh.edu
http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/furcyd
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