🚀 go-pugleaf

Oops!  A very good posting by Doug Pase on computer languages, and (oops!)
he cites the ancient Greek God Backus ;-).

I off handedly brought the old subject of column major arrays up
(remember lexical order versus others reasons).  I got this BEFORE Doug's
posting arrived.  And, no, he doesn't read the Usenet.

>Date: Fri, 16 Sep 88 15:06:53 PDT
>From: John Backus
>To: Eugene miya <eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov>
>Message-Id: <880916.150653....>
>Subject: Re: Sorry to bother you
>In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri,
>             <8809161958.AA08970@aurora.arc.nasa.gov>
>
> other work-oriented personal stuff deleted
>
>The choice of column orientation of matrices in Fortran was based on
>the fact that in the 704 (and, I think, generally) the test for reaching
>the end of a row did not depend on the row number. Since we expected that
>it was far more common to scan row-wise, this choice enabled us to avoid
>changing the end-of-row-test at the end of every row.

Editing for some privacy.

Another gross generalization from

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
  resident cynic at the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
  "Mailers?! HA!", "If my mail does not reach you, please accept my apology."
  {uunet,hplabs,ncar,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene
  "Send mail, avoid follow-ups.  If enough, I'll summarize."