Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:52:11 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

FORTRAN was even worse, at least in the bad old days. Porting Adventure
and Dungeon from the PDP-11 to Univac's 360 workalikes was lots of fun.
Not only were there a lot of DECisms (RAD50 constants, anyone?)
but I had to convert ASCII to EBCDIC (including decrypting the message
file, translating it, and re-encrypting it).  But I _really_ wanted to
play Dungeon, and I didn't have access to a PDP-11...

I won't name names but when I did an interface to a large US Midwestern
state's criminal justice network the queries and returned data had to be
translated to/from EBCDIC. Their last card reader must have broken a
couple of years ago when they went to a new ASCII API.