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From: geodandw <geodandw@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 21:20:37 -0400
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On 9/26/24 20:52, Peter Flass wrote:
> 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.
> 
Cobol was also very portable.