Input-Output

Abstract

Of all of the aspects of language design, input-output (or I/O) is regarded as the most distasteful. One reason for this is likely that it is impossible to make the design of this part of a language entirely independent of the computer’s characteristics. Some language designers have gone so far as to put their collective heads in the sand and not define input-output at all. The ALGOL60 team was an early sinner in this regard, and more recently the Euclid design group has done the same. But most language designers have faced up to the fact that it is better to design as much of the I/O in a machine independent manner, than to have the entire facility patched on by the language implementors.

“A PRINT statement does not imply that printing will occur, and a WRITE statement does not imply that printing will not occur. lines 1046–1048”, FORTRAN77 Manual