Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 25 Sep 2024 15:48:01 GMT
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote:

Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip up TeX back
in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of the crop among his
options. You got to put that language in perspective and see it
through the lens of its time!

Sorry, nope. Lots of languages from Ye Olden Dayes have their share of
jankiness, but some things are just inexcusably wretched - and treating
arrays of different sizes as distinct types is the most boneheaded,
bass-ackwards solution to the problem of bounds-checking ever devised
by Devil, God, or Man. It *A.* adds compiler complexity only to *B.*
burden the programmer with the same amount of bookkeeping required in
languages without bounds-checking, while *C.* giving *less* flexibility
in the final analysis. Truly masochistic.