I went through the first Fortran manual and didn't see anything about a backtrace being printed on abnormal termination.
Did that exist in the first version, or was it implemented later?
- 12I think that this was not defined by the language, but was a feature (or not) of a specific implementation/platform.– Wayne ConradCommentedMay 10, 2023 at 16:37
- 3I wonder when the first backtrace was printed at all, regardless of language. Can't remember when I first saw one. It wasn't a thing for assembly language programmers. And early Fortran programmers didn't have a stack. Routines were not recursive. Memory dumps didn't include backtraces because they were provided by the OS which didn't know about programming language runtimes. I bet FORTRAN programmers had to make do with marking up dumps by hand like assembly coders for a long long time. Probably COBOL too? As a guess I'd bet LISP programmers saw them first.– davidbakCommentedMay 10, 2023 at 17:04
- 4@davidbak Backtraces were in Lisp 1.5– texdr.aftCommentedMay 10, 2023 at 17:41
- 4@WayneConrad that's exactly what I meant by marking up dumps. I did a lot of it for assembly language. You put little rectangles around interesting values and drew arrows to other interesting values. Your printout ended up looking like - well, one of those movies where the crazy paranoid guy has a corkboard on the wall with lots of pictures pinned up and marked up with different colored sharpies and yarn stretched from pin to pin in a big random graph ...– davidbakCommentedMay 10, 2023 at 20:01
- 2All languages (at least BAL, COBOL, FORTRAN and PL/I that I know of had ABEND dumps on DOS/VS and MVS in the 1970s, but those were more like core dumps printed on greenbar in hex. Very useful if you knew what you were doing.– RonJohnCommentedMay 11, 2023 at 9:31
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1 Answer
It seems that to answer this question, we have to find a few examples and decide which is earliest.
To that end, the System/360 OS FORTRAN IV level G compiler, from 1966, offers this:
+--------------------------------------------------+ | IHC219I | | TRACEBACK FOLLOWS ROUTINE ISN REG. 14 | | IBCOM 820068FC | | MASTR 00005378 | | PAYROLL 00003148 | | ENTRY POINT = 5000 | +--------------------------------------------------+ Figure 58. Sample Traceback for Execution-Time Errors See page 82 in C28-6639-1 FORTRAN IV G Programmers Guide.
The level H compiler has a similar facility, with a couple more registers displayed.
