Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 01:23:57 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Yep.
But typing in 60 variables is no slower.
And frankly no harder to debug

You haven't lived until you've done embedded SQL. First you create a
statement like

sprintf(stmt, "INSERT INTO FOO(bar, baz, bliv) VALUES (?, ?, ?)");

Then comes

EXEC SQL PREPARE do_stmt FROM :stmt;

and finally

EXEC SQL EXECUTE do_stmt using
     :bar   :bar_ind
     :baz   :baz_ind
     :bliv  :bliv_ind;


Of course in real life you have a lot more than three field names, and you
damn well better get the number of ? right. Then when you execute the
statement you'd better have the right number of parameters in the right
order.  bar, baz, and bliv are usually globals you've filled in elsewhere
from a struct. bar_ind and so forth are optional but are filled in with an
error flag if the insert failed.


No matter how you approach it database programming is ugly.