Why these original FORTRAN quirks?
in [Fortran]
|
From: jmfbahciv on 20 Oct 2006 09:48 In article <32TZg.31072$zF5.13870(a)bignews1.bellsouth.net>, "Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj" <urjlew(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: >Richard E Maine wrote: >> Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj <urjlew(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: >> >> >>>Keypunchers, unless summer interns from a technical school or such like, >>>are not expected to be the Fortran pre compiler syntax checking phase. >> >> >> When I was an obnoxious youngster (the young part has changed :-)) still >> in undergrad school doing keypunching for some of the senior engineers, >> I got my figurative hand slapped for "improving" some of the code on the >> fly as a typed. >> >> In retrospect, I realize that some of my "improvements" weren't. For >> example, I'd "hand-optimize" literal arithmetic expressions, doing >> things along the lines of changing 2.0*3.14159 into 6.28318. My >> "optimization" probably didn't actually speed up anything, but made the >> derivation of the code less clear. (Ok, most engineers would probably >> recognize the 2*pi, but other cases weren't so recognizable). >> >> And, although I did deserve the figurative hand-slap (I should have at >> least mentioned my proposed "improvements" instead of just doing them), >> it probably had a bit of extra feeling behind it because in other cases >> my corrections actually fixed bugs, which embarassed the senior >> engineer. >> >Another gratuitous comment! >Keypunchers are supposed to quickly and accurately convert text written >on coding forms, or in some cases other forms, into machine readable >media. Anything that slows down this process, such as reading the >material for comprehension will tend to slow down the efficiency of the >transfer process. This is another reason that the keypuncher should not >play at being an editor, or filter. Well, that attitude does explain why you can't learn from us in this newsgroup. /BAH
From: jmfbahciv on 20 Oct 2006 09:56 In article <1hngrag.12ow4591sit5ihN%nospam(a)see.signature>, nospam(a)see.signature (Richard E Maine) wrote: >Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj <urjlew(a)bellsouth.net> wrote: > >> Richard E Maine wrote: > >> > When I was an obnoxious youngster (the young part has changed :-)) still >> > in undergrad school doing keypunching for some of the senior engineers, >> > I got my figurative hand slapped for "improving" some of the code on the >> > fly as a typed. >> > >> > In retrospect, I realize that some of my "improvements" weren't.... > >> Keypunchers are supposed to quickly and accurately convert text written >> on coding forms, or in some cases other forms, into machine readable >> media. Anything that slows down this process, such as reading the >> material for comprehension will tend to slow down the efficiency of the >> transfer process. This is another reason that the keypuncher should not >> play at being an editor, or filter. > >Although that might apply to a person whose job was to be a keypuncher, No, it doesn't and it didn't. The only time this would be true would be in shops that had an anal retentive manager. >my job was to be an engineering trainee. Keypunching for the "real" >engineers was just a piece of the job. As a trainee, it actually does >help to pay attention to what one is doing instead of turning off the >brain and operating by rote (unless one is training for a position that >is purely to do the rote operations). > >Much like "optimizing" code, doing a good job of optimizing a work >process requires one to stand back and understand what the larger >objectives really are. Otherwise you end up optimzing the wrong things. >In this case, optimizing my throughput as a keypuncher would have been >detrimental to the most important part of my job as a trainee. > >Some of what I did was wrong, as elaborated in the parts I elided above, >but thinking about what I was doing was not wrong. One of the differences in what you did and what real data entry people did was to mark all corrections or ask the guy before changing. I remember one keypunch job...Fortran code written in the middle of night after getting home from serious design meetings at the bar. AFter the 10th question, I was told to just fix them; no need to ask. Now at DEC, the corrections procedures were different depending on what the code was for. In some cases, the code was written with bugs on purpose. So we knew pretty much if errors were supposed to be there and if they weren't. We also did compliations and assemblies and fixed the obvious bugs with the appropriate written markups for the programmer to check. Good bosses expected and wanted their secretaries to correct misspellings. Data enterers and keypunchers did a similar service. /BAH
From: Larry__Weiss on 20 Oct 2006 11:59 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? - Larry
From: Stan Barr on 20 Oct 2006 13:36 On 19 Oct 2006 21:00:19 -0700, Terence <tbwright(a)cantv.net> wrote: >The missile was later test fired on the Woomera Range in Australia, >where, funnily, I now live... > Ah well, you probably know about the bit of Blue Streak wreckage at the Giles Metrological Station* then. There was a short piece about it in the Radio Society of Great Britain's magazine this month. Radio ham Ron Jones, callsign G8AXK, used to work on them, apparantly. * Somewhere on the NT, SA and WA border, it says. -- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com (Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.) The future was never like this!
From: Richard Maine on 20 Oct 2006 13:39
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? Yes. The associate block in f2003 is related to the Pascal "with", but is more flexible. It isn't exactly teh same, but it has intentional elements of similarity. I don't speak VB and can't comment on that. -- Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience; email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement. domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain |