Your Roots, Man! - FORTRAN

Pondering the origins of semi colons for the termination of statements got me pondering the roots of Java. So now the journey begins:

FORTRAN:
Example via AJMiller

PROGRAM MAIN
INTEGER N, X
EXTERNAL SUB1
COMMON /GLOBALS/ N
X = 0
PRINT *, 'Enter number of repeats'
READ (*,*) N
CALL SUB1(X,SUB1)
END

SUBROUTINE SUB1(X,DUMSUB)
INTEGER N, X
EXTERNAL DUMSUB
COMMON /GLOBALS/ N
IF(X .LT. N)THEN
  X = X + 1
  PRINT *, 'x = ', X
  CALL DUMSUB(X,DUMSUB)
END IF
END

FORTRAN is short for IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System. It is regarded as the world's first high level programming language. At a time when programs were sequences of numeric codes, the idea of FORTRAN was to allow the developer to write calculations that were similar to mathematical notation. This idea further pushed the idea of what would later be known as a compiler.

Prior to FORTRAN there were implementations of basic compiler like tools to allow for some mnemonics to be used to make coding easier. But they didn't go very far in alleviating the problems inherent in very early programming.

John Backus and a small team labored from 1954-1957 to come up with FORTRAN. Many doubted they would succeed. How could generated could possibly be as good as hand code? FORTRAN proved them wrong. The resulting code it produced ran as fast or very nearly as fast as hand coded programs.

And the world was changed.