During the same Fortran Standards Committee meeting at which the name "FORTRAN 77" was chosen, a technical proposal was incorporated into the official distribution bearing the title, "Letter O considered harmful". This proposal purported to address the confusion that sometimes arises between the letter "O" and the numeral zero, by eliminating the letter from allowable variable names. However, the method proposed was to eliminate the letter from the character set entirely (thereby retaining 48 as the number of lexical characters, which the colon had increased to 49). This was considered beneficial in that it would promote structured programming, by making it impossible to use the notorious GO TO statement as before. (Troublesome FORMAT statements would also be eliminated.) It was noted that this "might invalidate some existing programs" but that most of these "probably were non-conforming, anyway".
Typical contradictory statement or issue. If the letter "o" is bad, why did they name it "Fortran"?
When I first started programming, at NASA, I used Octal machine language, on a (PCM)Telemetry Processor that the tracking stations used for the Apollo project. It was three 6 ft high racks of equipment and had a 4K core memory and a paper tape reader to load programs with.
I used to write DOS batch files and I frequently used the "goto" command to jump to another section based on an outcome. I'm glad the O was not removed.
