Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 02:30:44 -0500, c186282 wrote:

On 3/4/25 1:25 AM, rbowman wrote:

On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 23:02:44 -0500, c186282 wrote:
 

    It's easy to kinda drift into that during development, you always
    think of ONE more thing you need to pass. However stage two, you
    put all that crap in a struct and pass one pointer. Each function
    can extract what it needs from that struct and ignore the rest.

 
I never made it to anywhere close to 60 parameters. We did have one
utility that took 22 command line parameters but it was never meant to
be invoked manually and came with a csh. Even then they all were
stuffed into a struct before the real function was called.
 
Even worse, the parameters were field widths in a positional record. I
truly hate positional records but the damn things live on.

 
   Hey, they have a function and certain simplicity.

They are simple all right. It's always so much fun counting over to the
73rd character and knowing foo is contained in the next 5 characters.
Unless whoever constructed the record happened to leave a space out of the
value at the 52nd character that was supposed to be 8 characters and
everything past that is off by 1.

But you save all those useless bytes for field delimiters!