Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
in [Fortran]
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From: Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj on 1 Nov 2006 01:55 krw wrote: > 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. > Ok. I'll try to spell it out. Recalling something that she wrote about her DOB, in 1968 our esteemed /BAH would have been about 12-14 years old.
From: Steve O'Hara-Smith on 1 Nov 2006 05:23 On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:12:38 -0800 glen herrmannsfeldt <gah(a)ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote: > Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: > > (snip) > > > Cue many people to tell us where relocation is still in active > > use and why it's better than PIC or memory mapping :) > > PIC tends to be slower on most processors, such that it isn't Hmm that's a surprise. ISTR using relative addressing as an optimisation back in the days I wrote Z80 assembler a lot and surely PIC is mostly using relative addressing exclusively. I had occasionally wondered why it was not the default. > the default when it isn't needed. Memory mapping is usually on > to coarse of boundaries, maybe 4K. (At least for link time relocation.) That's true, I was thinking of load time relocation and linking loaders which AFAIK are completely gone. It's been a while since I last looked at the detailed behaviour of a linker but they seem to talk about symbol resolution these days instead of relocation. -- C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see | http://www.sohara.org/
From: Steve O'Hara-Smith on 1 Nov 2006 05:25 On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:47:56 GMT Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> wrote: > Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: > > 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. Not a term I ever came across. AIUI PIC mostly involves using relative addressing exclusively. -- C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see | http://www.sohara.org/
From: jmfbahciv on 1 Nov 2006 07:19 In article <1162334687.412369(a)bats.mcs.vuw.ac.nz>, harper(a)mcs.vuw.ac.nz (John Harper) wrote: >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. At DECUS, one of my first questions to a customer who wanted to chat with me was his favorite programming lanugague. Then I could talk about OS and development details using that lanugages concepts. It's difficult to talk about tech to somebody who has never used your tools. /BAH
From: Joe Morris on 1 Nov 2006 07:57
jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: > 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. Maybe I was just lucky...but my MS thesis (a program simiulating digital circuitry, including a compiler to define the circuit) was presented to a committee that was quite up-front at being unqualified to analyze the underlying code. What interested them was whether the code actually did what it claimed to do. One thing that I included in both the thesis and my oral defense of it was extensive test scripts and their output...starting with trivial primatives ("does this inverter actually emit NOT(input)?") and building up to a complex mesh, showing the propagation of pulses through the various elements. I'll admit that I was fortunate to be working for the computer center at that time, so I didn't have to worry about paying for the computer time. <grin> Joe Morris |