Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
in [Fortran]
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From: Charlie Gibbs on 20 Oct 2006 12:24 In article <12jfi8k2tjgel7c(a)corp.supernews.com>, lfw(a)airmail.net (Larry__Weiss) writes: > Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj wrote: > >> Keypunchers, unless summer interns from a technical school or such >> like, are not expected to be the Fortran pre compiler syntax checking >> phase. Similarly we instructed our student help staffing the >> input-output window (i.e. accepting job decks & handing out the >> printed outputs) not to hand out programming advice, i.e. not play >> at being consultants, even if they were seniors with some programming >> courses under their belts. > > Plus, learning to code benefits from a "school of hard-knocks" > experience. You don't really want to take that away from someone > who is serious about learning the art (or is forced to become so > because of job expectations). > > The proper place for such feedback is in a mentoring partnership > or in a formal code-review. Still, we did have a help desk at school. Occasionally I'd get stuck on a bug bad enough to make me stand in line to see whether the volunteer staffer could help me. One day, while in line, I happened to peek over the shoulder of the person in front of me. I spotted his bug, pointed it out, and found myself clearing the line from the back end while the official help desk person cleared it from the front. Thus I got to the head of the line much more quickly - only to find that the help desk person couldn't figure out my bug either. That was the beginning of my "hard knocks" experience. -- /~\ cgibbs(a)kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs) \ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. / \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
From: Craig Powers on 20 Oct 2006 14:04 Larry__Weiss wrote: > jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >> I do not consider 128-character variable names an improved solution. >> It's a huge mess maker. >> > > I have to agree. The problems I have reading code these days > involve either sets of those very long names where the difference is > subtle, -or- a common simple name that applies to each of a set of > dissimilar objects, and the binding to a particular object is > several dozen lines back from the reference to that common name. > > I hesitate to ask, but does modern Fortran have that something > similar to the nestable "With" type of block that Pascal and > VB have? It's not quite as concise as With, but there is Associate in F2003 that lets you create an alias for a variable or expression IIRC.
From: Charles Richmond on 20 Oct 2006 14:37 Charlie Gibbs wrote: > > In article <12jfi8k2tjgel7c(a)corp.supernews.com>, lfw(a)airmail.net > (Larry__Weiss) writes: > > > Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj wrote: > > > >> Keypunchers, unless summer interns from a technical school or such > >> like, are not expected to be the Fortran pre compiler syntax checking > >> phase. Similarly we instructed our student help staffing the > >> input-output window (i.e. accepting job decks & handing out the > >> printed outputs) not to hand out programming advice, i.e. not play > >> at being consultants, even if they were seniors with some programming > >> courses under their belts. > > > > Plus, learning to code benefits from a "school of hard-knocks" > > experience. You don't really want to take that away from someone > > who is serious about learning the art (or is forced to become so > > because of job expectations). > > > > The proper place for such feedback is in a mentoring partnership > > or in a formal code-review. > > Still, we did have a help desk at school. Occasionally I'd get > stuck on a bug bad enough to make me stand in line to see whether > the volunteer staffer could help me. One day, while in line, I > happened to peek over the shoulder of the person in front of me. > I spotted his bug, pointed it out, and found myself clearing the > line from the back end while the official help desk person cleared > it from the front. Thus I got to the head of the line much more > quickly - only to find that the help desk person couldn't figure > out my bug either. That was the beginning of my "hard knocks" > experience. > "If you drop the ball, nobody else will pick it up... but everybody will give it a kick!!!" -- +----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Charles and Francis Richmond richmond at plano dot net | +----------------------------------------------------------------+
From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 20 Oct 2006 14:47 In comp.lang.fortran Larry__Weiss <lfw(a)airmail.net> wrote: > I hesitate to ask, but does modern Fortran have that something > similar to the nestable "With" type of block that Pascal and > VB have? Not exactly the same, but WITH always reminded me of structure assignment that PL/I has, but many other languages don't. ANSI C allows passing structures as function arguments, but won't do a simple structure assignment. K&R C only allowed pointers to structures to be passed to functions. PL/I allows for structure expressions, either by the shape of the structure, or with the BY NAME option, for elements with the same element name. -- glen
From: Larry__Weiss on 20 Oct 2006 14:54
Craig Powers wrote: > It's not quite as concise as With, but there is Associate in F2003 that > lets you create an alias for a variable or expression IIRC. > I looked it up, and it seems like a C preprocessor macro defined with local scope. Am I missing anything subtle about it? - Larry |