Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder2.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Is there a way in Fortran to designate an integer value as
 integer*8 ?
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2024 20:53:29 -0000 (UTC)
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On Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:56:47 -0500, Lynn McGuire wrote:

> BTW, my software dates before version control systems.

Quite a bit of mine did, too, back in the day. Didn’t stop me from putting 
them into version control. I even wrote some utility scripts to help with 
the process <https://bitbucket.org/ldo17/fake_vcs/>.

> And I like change notes in my code, it helps to figure out what
> is going on.

You soon discover that version control history logs do all that, and more. 
Remember, they show you, not just the comments you entered, but the actual 
file diffs that go with them. Your current header comments cannot provide 
that information.

Git also offers something you’re currently probably not doing because it’s 
too difficult to do: branching and merging.

> And some day we are going to change version control systems again.

That will likely not be the difficult part. All the open-source VCSes 
offer bulk import/export functions, to allow moving entire repos and 
commit histories between them. Git offered plugins to allow easier 
interoperation with other VCSes like Mercurial and SVN; any future 
replacement for Git will have to do at least as well.

> And I am not going to upgrade 850,000 lines of Fortran F77 code to F90
> code just to have prettier code.  I would still be here in 10 years
> fixing all of the bugs from that disaster.

Think about making it easier to maintain going forward.