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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: 4 Mar 2025 08:42:11 GMT
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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!