Re: The joy of FORTRAN

186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

On 9/24/24 8:26 AM, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 23/09/2024 23:45, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

   Hey, want "Real Computing" ? Try FORTRAN
   or COBOL. THOSE were the foundation and
   persist to this day. Wrote a FORTRAN app
   just a couple of years ago - mostly to vex
   the New Guys. Also a short COBOL app, that
   oughtta REALLY give 'em the shits !  :-)

 
Back in 1985, I changed jobs from a University computer center, where we
did our technical documentation using Univac's @DOC processor, to a
small industrial computer system integration firm, where we built
real-time systems on RSX-11M. I missed the @DOC so much that I wrote a
re-implementation in FORTRAN IV. Used it for years afterwards, until I
landed at a larger house doing communications work on Unix, and switched
to /troff/.

 
 
  Hey, FORTRAN *will* Get It Done as neatly as most
  anything else. If you need many decades worth of
  exotic math libs, you'll find them in FORTRAN too.
  It is NOT an obsolete language/approach.
 
  For the younger people, note that Python carries
  over a lot of FORTRAN ideas, including easy
  string-slicing.
 
  If you can do BASIC then you can do FORTRAN, but
  does anybody use BASIC anymore ? Intel/IBM did
  sell BASCOM ... a BASIC compiler ... and it DID
  speed up yer code like by 10X :-)
 
  COBOL ... well ... would rather NOT use it.
  The whole "self documenting" idea turned out
  to be crap - COBOL is *hard* to understand
  sometimes. That's why COBOL programmers can
  get really high-pay jobs these days, because
  so much of that irreplacable biz software
  from the 60s was writ in COBOL. Nobody can
  AFFORD to re-write it. It worked, it works,
  it was writ by REALLY GOOD narrow-tie Dilberts,
  so you just have to MAINTAIN it like forever.
 

For a long time, FORTRAN was the only remotely portable language, so lots
of programs were written in it.

--
Pete