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.