Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 28/02/2025 02:34, rbowman wrote:

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:43:51 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

When all you had was Macro assembler, writing a good library of Macros
gave you almost a high level language, except it wasn't portable.
>
C *was* portable, mostly.
>
And it was faster to write than Macros assembler. It was really a no
brainer.

 Sadly, macros made their way into C. The basic idea was fine but we had
one programmer who laid awake nights thinking up new perverted things to
do with macros. I forget if it was Kernighan or Ritchie who later said if
they had only known what people would do with them...
 C++ doubled down with inline functions.

Yeah. I tend to agree with your view here.
Macros that are part of some library that are explicitly documented  are one thing : Random 'LIGHT_MY_FIRE(a,b,c)' not so much.
--
“Progress is precisely that which rules and regulations did not foresee,”
  – Ludwig von Mises