Path: ...!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: rbowman Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN Date: 4 Mar 2025 08:42:11 GMT Lines: 27 Message-ID: References: <794451758.762727703.370029.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> <-_6cnTT2QMGxMVv6nZ2dnZfqn_qdnZ2d@giganews.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net nJ1tkL+YuWbc/vXprnYvMg3Ef0DCYfrZrM5EpvRU8uro4WjwXX Cancel-Lock: sha1:/P/RmfUNkyVXaJapnMuVZkzXAnI= sha256:WmZYl8rBbiLITnJj6ONLusRAlfWpaEljhyY1jnCPH+A= User-Agent: Pan/0.160 (Toresk; ) Bytes: 2644 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!