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Retrocomputing

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  • As an ancient Fortran programmer I fully concur. In Fortran spacing is part of the syntax of the language, and trying to copy and align code with columns on a punch card needed code source material to be printed in a monospace font. An additional aspect you may wish to include: in both old and new programming languages, indenting code from the start of a line using spaces and/or tab characters is used to indicate code structure, so that when reading you can skip blocks of code that are related but not what you are looking for with ease. This remains hugely important to this day. Commented Jan 6, 2024 at 6:42
  • However, Fortran 66 or 77 standard documents do not use a typical typewriter font. Maybe it is monispace, but it is a cut very similar to the rest of the text, just in capitals. Commented Jan 7, 2024 at 8:13
  • @traktor, yes, thanks, edited. We hope people indent and sometimes they don't and we cry. :-) Commented Jan 12, 2024 at 15:48
  • Code indentation with a proportional font still works as long as the 'space' character has a single fixed size. Which isn't necessarily true for cold-metal typefaces, but could be enforced for hand-typeset code. Commented Jan 13, 2024 at 14:42