It's a war story from my father, so I have to admit that the details could be corrupted. He worked with a variety of machines in the 60s, so it was believable that one had a permissive enough FORTRAN to allow that. It's also possible that your explanation of it being reference-argument corruption.

I'm almost curious enough to fire up a PDP-8 emulator and see what 4K FORTRAN does. Almost. http://techtinkering.com/2009/07/14/running-4k-fortran-on-a-...