When FORTRAN was introduced, it was said that performance was better without FORTRAN

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For example, in Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming," it is argued that a limitation of compiler technology in the 1960s was that it had difficulty optimizing generated code and could not match the optimization achieved by hand-written assembly.

A group of independent research papers published in the 1960s and early 1970s also criticized the Fortran compilers of the time for their immature optimization techniques, resulting in inferior performance compared to hand-crafted assembly code.

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