Memory stomps via common blocks, hours of debugging joy for Fortran and C/C++ developers alike!
Ping
wow, my first classes were BASIC, FORTRAN, then Visual Basic then C then C++
After a while, we got one million (64-bit) "words" of Extended Core Storage (ECS).
That worked out to a whopping 8MB of high-speed (non-executable) storage!
With that configuration we designed reactors for the USS Enterprise, commercial Light-water breeder reactors and most of the Navy's nuclear submarines in use throughout the 70s and 80s.
We learned to write programs that were highly efficient, in terms of storage and execution speed.
(sniff) getting sentimental ...
I actually used Fortran very little. We had an IBM 360, with its much dreaded 'Job Control Language'. JCL had to be the worst set of operating system commands ever invented. I stuck with DTSS Basic. It spoke mostly English, a feature, BTW, I think helped launch DOS in the PC market. Does anyone still remember that the original IBM PCs would boot to a hardware Basic Interpreter if there were no floppies in the drives?
The good ole days of programming. When a line of code was still called a “card.”
I still use a copy of Visual Fortran for Windows.
I’ve used Fortran since 1966, and some of my programming is probably still in use today.
There is nothing wrong with Fortran.
I cut my teeth on VAX Fortran and BASIC.
‘Pod.
Worked at the Ford Research Center in 1979 developing EPA testing programs to run large truck engines on the dyno. Lots of very carefully written FORTRAN.
I owe my beginnings as a programmer to FORTRAN-4 and 77 on DEC PDP machines. Haven’t written any FORTRAN in decades but still could easily. DotNET C# isn’t that much different.
The Fortran modules work, they've been verified, validated, and tested out the wazoo for years. Why waste the time, money, and introduce risk in re-coding something that doesn't need it? Sure, it's not sexy. The younger programmers kind of pretend that part of the make file doesn't exist... ;-)
My first work out of college was as a programmer. I was writing in “MUMPS” and then “MUMPS-11” on DEC PDP platforms, then hopped to a different company writing for an investment accounting solution in FORTRAN-IV on PRIME mini-computers (remember them?). We ported that application to IBM mainframes - all 6 million lines of code. Some idiot of the day thought ADABAS was the best database for us to use - I remember it didn’t store real-numbers natively, so we had to write our own subroutines to pack/un-pack any real numbers into text fields.
That was a time when programming was an art, and every day was marked by creative solutions and work-arounds for system limitations.
In 1977 another student and I tried programming an algorithm in FORTRAN during a class break. After the program ran for something like half a CPU second we hit the break key. We had screwed up and compared a variable that didn’t default to an integer (like “I” or “J”) to “1”. Oops. Later, we took practically the same exact code and ran it as PL/I, if I recall correctly.
Fortran IV on a Honeywell 2020 with a whopping 32 K of “core” memory.
That was back in 1975, and was my first programming language.
And I agree, there nothing wrong with Fortran.
That it does. I had a short course in Fortran in college, back in the day when a computer usually filled an entire room and programming was done by way of punch cards. Five or six years later though, I was working in an office that had two Lanier word processors, and not long after that, IBM came out with its PC.
Got my B.S. degree learning FORTRAN-77, Assembler, COBOL, C, and Unix.
Oh, and debugging hex dumps.
Programming is a lot easier today when you have an infinite amount of RAM and disk space.
We have a 2000 line Javascript app that is running twice for some reason, doubling the amounts every time you leave a field. I told them to multiply everything by .5 at the end of the block and that will fix the problem.
I used Fortran 4 on a 6400 for several years, but my first machine was a CDC 3800. We also had Fortran II on an SDS 930.
At that time, until Pascal came along, much of the computer science at the university I attended centered on how to abuse Fortran to do non-numerical programming; and my first job out of college was writing a compiler in Fortran (the only language available at the company).
Decades later, I was the chief Java evangelist at the company where I worked; but lately I've thought of dusting off Fortran to do some purely mathematical financial planning simulations.