Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
in [Fortran]
|
From: Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj on 31 Oct 2006 14:04 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > > Sigh! Now read my preveious words to this post. You are talking > to somebody who was the first to do that kind of work at a > university who lasted longer than a 3 month work study grant. > > I'm talking about a time when college-types were changing to > putting their data into machine-readable format. Your experiences > started a long time after that transition was completed. > > /BAH Mizz Huizenga, FYI, I'm writing about the period 1968 - 1999 in total, But 68 - ~80 for the most part. I get the impression that you are from somewhere around 1954-56? But perhaps your experiences started early :) -- Rostyk
From: Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj on 31 Oct 2006 14:46 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > In article <ei7j7s$92a$2(a)newslocal.mitre.org>, > Joe Morris <jcmorris(a)mitre.org> wrote: > >>Charles Richmond <richchas(a)comcast.net> writes: >> >> >>>I knew several engineering graduate students in the late 70's, >>>and understand that programming work for their theses *had* to >>>be done in FORTRAN. The thesis would be rejected if the software >>>was done in another language. >> >>Ouch. What was the justification for that policy? And at what university? > > > Remember that Charles is an auld fart. My best guesses are: > 1. That's the only lanugage the advisors knew or > 2. Interdeparmental politics (a.k.a budgeting games) required > that FORTRAN to be used for past and future expenditures. > > >>Assuming that FORTRAN was not the *subject* of the thesis, I can't >>see any reason why "the most appropriate tool available" would not >>have been the test. Or *was* that the issue -- discouraging the >>use of cute alternatives which at that particular university were >>inferior *for the specific thesis topics*? (e.g., using COBOL >>to do scientific calculations) > > > Think back to days when this stuff cost serious money like $10K > and $100K a year. > > /BAH > How about the at least theoretical hope by the people in charge, that the published theses would be read and the content used by others in the academic community, and therefore the publication language had to be commonly understood and any code could be reproducibly run. To that add the reason suggested by Mr. Morris. Suppose in contrast that the code had been rewritten for publication in the ACM dialect of publication ALGOL. How many would expect it to be checkable and/or executable by anyone? :) I believe that useability is the reason that ACM changed the publications requirements of its algorithms to Fortran from Algol. -- Rostyk
From: John Harper on 31 Oct 2006 17:44 In article <20061031063427.58352821.steveo(a)eircom.net>, Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo(a)eircom.net> wrote: > > Hmm they might have been using Pascal and Algol a lot in DAMTP >(where Hawking has his office) but down the road in the Cav FORTRAN ruled >the roost around 1980 - although there were many people who sang the >virtues of Algol and did their work in FORTRAN. I spent some sabbaticals in DAMTP, Cambridge around then: there were both Algol68 and Fortran users. I knew the language preference of only one Camb. Chemistry person: Fortran. I don't know what she uses now. -- John Harper, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand e-mail john.harper(a)vuw.ac.nz phone (+64)(4)463 5341 fax (+64)(4)463 5045
From: Peter Flass on 31 Oct 2006 17:47 Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: > On Mon, 30 Oct 06 12:17:52 GMT > jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > > >>In article <m3vem36n18.fsf(a)garlic.com>, >> Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn(a)garlic.com> wrote: > > >>>one of the other things left over from the os/360 real memory days is >>>figuring out where the program image was to be loaded ... and then >>>having to swizzle all the "relocatable" address constants that were >>>frequently randomly distributed thru-out the program image. >> >>Yes. Is the word "relocatable" even used in CS classes anymore >>other than as buzzword to sound impressive? > > > I strongly suspect that if it is mentioned it is mentioned as > something historical and baroque which has been rendered obsolete by the > more modern approaches of memory mapping and position independent code. > > Cue many people to tell us where relocation is still in active > use and why it's better than PIC or memory mapping :) > As I understand PIC, it is basically what we used to call "self-relocating" code.
From: krw on 31 Oct 2006 23:12
In article <78N1h.15164$Fd7.10469(a)bignews6.bellsouth.net>, urjlew(a)bellsouth.net says... > jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > > > > > Sigh! Now read my preveious words to this post. You are talking > > to somebody who was the first to do that kind of work at a > > university who lasted longer than a 3 month work study grant. > > > > I'm talking about a time when college-types were changing to > > putting their data into machine-readable format. Your experiences > > started a long time after that transition was completed. > > > > /BAH > > Mizz Huizenga, Nice back-handed slap! > FYI, I'm writing about the period 1968 - 1999 in total, > But 68 - ~80 for the most part. I get the impression that you are from > somewhere around 1954-56? You really have no clue. DEC in '54-56? LOL! > But perhaps your experiences started early :) Perhaps you started without your coffee this morning. Do try harder to show what intelligence you have. -- Keith |