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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2024 01:49:43 +0000
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
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From: "186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net>
Organization: wokiesux
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 21:49:43 -0400
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On 9/27/24 1:43 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-09-27, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
> 
>>     I always liked ascii-delimited multi-value records.
>>     Hey, you can actually READ them. They are also VERY
>>     easy and cheap for microcontrollers and such to
>>     create on the fly.
> 
> Yes, I got into them early - and found it was a short easy
> step to CSV, so now my stuff can be read by the people in
> spreadsheet land.  I have, however, had to put a fair amount
> of effort into what I call "Excel-proofing" my data, since
> our favourite Redmond software company loves meddling with it.
> ISO 8601 does a good job of sidestepping Excel's obsession
> with turning dates into month/day/year format, for instance.

   I ran into ascii-delimited MV records when I did
   some things with the PICK system long back. These
   were largely 'text' records ... 10000 was "10000",
   not any binary rep. As such, the 'high' ascii vals
   were used as record/field/subfield/subsubfield
   delimiters (this was before unicode). On old PCs
   you could directly view the delims - those funky
   graphics-like characters so handy for making
   text/terminal forms.

   However I'd been doing a number of microcontroller-
   based dataloggers and found that building up
   ascii-delimited was really THE easiest way of
   storing lots of sensor values. You just keep
   tacking-stuff onto the end of the string and
   save it when done. No more exotic structure or
   logic required.

   <Temp1><subfield-mark><Temp2><field-mark><Humid1>
   <subfield-mark><Humid2><subfield-mark><Humid3>
   <field-mark>" etc until you've done all the
   various kinds of sensors and then you stick a
   <record-mark> at the end. Human-readable.
   Revelation DB system used ascii-255 as the record
   mark, 254 as the field marks and worked backwards
   from there, thus allowing about 127 levels of
   sub-sub values though nobody EVER used THAT many.

   Machine-reading is straight-up. Some kinds of
   EDITING can get peculiar however because you
   want some kind of 'intent' defined - 'data
   dictionaries' are a common approach. DBs
   generally use hashing to facilitate getting
   to a given record quickly.

   ANYWAY, those became my go-to kind of record
   keeping for many projects and I wrote little
   related functions in a number of langs.

   I've noted that some people think that because
   their high-level lang has a function for dealing
   with strings and such means it's better/faster
   but the TRUTH is that most langs are writ in 'C'
   and those functions are just handy, disguised,
   'C'. Just because you don't SEE 'strtok()' does
   not mean it isn't ACTUALLY used.

   Final note, FORTRAN is *still* good for most
   uses. It's fairly clear, un-fancy, and well-tuned
   and people added enough to it over the years so
   there's hardly any task you can't do with it.
   Still didn't find a native FORTRAN compiler for
   modern Linux though ... I suspect when Intel
   nixxed 8-bit code it broke most of them. Such
   a pity ... and 8-bits WERE enough for a lot
   of little things and SO nicely compact.