I think I can safely say Fortran, by IBM, was the first compiled language; at least the first successful one. It had many interesting concepts:

• It would generate computer instructions for an Arithmetic Expression such as:
  AREA=WIDTH * LENGTH and
  VOLUME=AREA * HEIGHT

  Much of the generated code used "Floating Point" so instructions were generated to do input/output conversion to and from decimal.

• Unfortunately, the designers of Fortran followed traditional mathematical formulas and put the name where the computed value to be stored on the left of the equal sign. It should have been on the right, which would allowed constructs such as:
  WIDTH * LENGTH = AREA * HEIGHT = VOLUME

  The real tragedy is, this error is still used in most computer languages, even today. I would like to take credit for noting this error, but I was first aware of it when it was pointed out in a lecture given by Tom Osborne who could be called the father of Hewlett Packard calculators.

• Fortran had some great ideas that unfortunately, have not propagated to "modern languages".
  1. Fortran had no reserved words. You could use names such as DO or READ, or even use: FORMAT as an array name.
  2. Fortran completely ignored the space character. Except in literals you could leave them out, or you could put spaces anywhere you thought it would make the program easier to read.

     With spaces FORTH takes almost exactly the opposite point of view. Every word must be bounded by at least one space. Even though I find it a real pain, LaForth still had this space dependency. Incidentally, this is the one area where Bob Smith and I disagree. But it is not a problem. We are each willing to accept the other's being wrong once in a while.

When at RCA I wrote a Fortran IV parser to identify any Fortran statement very rapidly, (this was in IBM 360 Assembly Language) allowing names of any length. It is a religion for me: a computer language should allow any length names. I put this into LaForth and it was the first change to change the Fig Forth, which allow names up to about 18 characters before it was released. Initially FORTH in a way allowed long names, but kept only the first three characters and the length of the name. This was OK to just get a job done; but was a disaster for a programming language. It meant that it could not differentiate between such words as: LOOP and LOOK or WORK and WORM

Bob Smith and I had both used APL (Another IBM product) it allowed names up to 128 characters. We both wanted to allow any length names in LaForth. It was done very simply: Names were just stored with a null character at the end. Actually the names were kept in reverse order to simplify other things.

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