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I also find it funny that they sort the program's lines by statement type to float all declarations to the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it; loading the source code in reverse order makes that a bit ambiguous)

That works with fortran because it doesn't (didn't; that has changed since) have dynamic memory allocation or recursion.

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Reordering could alter the program's semantics as well as being extra work for such limited machines. FORTRAN permitted explicit and implicit declarations. It would be quite legal to use I as an implicit INTEGER variable then later explicitly declare it to be REAL and use it accordingly so the position of the declaration in the source code was significant. Then there are declarations inside subroutines etc.

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