Hacker News Reader

But... Matlab was originally written in FORTRAN ("easy access to... LINPACK and EISPACK..."). Written by Cleve Moler, distributed by Jim Kweeder. May 25, 1982. 7852 lines of FORTRAN 66 (for the version I have).

"With proper use of overlays, it is possible run the system on a minicomputer with only 32K bytes of memory." -- Cleve Moler

Fred Weigel

View on HN

Sure, a lot of Matlab is in Fortran (and a lot of other software as well, though you would not know from the outside), but you don’t write in Fortran when using Matlab.

But, back in the day, if you wanted to add functions to MATLAB, you would add them in FORTRAN 66, and rebuild the MATLAB interpreter.

Microsoft BASIC-80 (around the same time) was written in assembler. You also don't write in assembler when using BASIC-80. But, BASIC-80 would be extended by assembler, in the same way that MATLAB would be extended by FORTRAN.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com