!!!
RAAAAHHH!!! FORTRAN!!!!!
[insert sound of computer crashing through plate glass window]
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oddly enough, just minutes later my computer randomly played "get me away from here I'm dying" -- is it mocking me, or is it a peace offering?
[insert sound of computer crashing through plate glass window]
------------------------------
oddly enough, just minutes later my computer randomly played "get me away from here I'm dying" -- is it mocking me, or is it a peace offering?
random bits cobbled together by j-dub
3 Comments:
Well, there have been a couple attempts at making Fortran more like a programming language, and less like a way of recording calculator keystrokes:
There’s Ratfor (RATionalized FORtran) written by Kernighan and Plauger (yes, that Kernighan and that Plauger). There’s also this steaming pile of bits called MORTRAN (like Fortran, except there’s MORe of it). Anyway, from what I’ve seen, the new dialect (Fortran95) is sensible. It has data structures. And I think they were going to shoehorn in some object-orientation.
Yeah, I spent summer of my first year in grad school hacking poorly commented Fortran (is there any other kind?). I could give someone a boot to the head.
actually, you make a good point. It's less the fortran itself, and more the lack of commenting in this gi-fucking-gantous code that is the issue.
which could (and does) happen with any language. my question is: with everyone I know complaining about the lack of commenting, why do we always end up sifting through the code that has none?
most code you'll find in science and engineering was written by people who weren't specifically trained to write code. and most people who write code in these fields consider it a chore to get out of the way. and, these same people can be a bit too smart: they learn a few things and then figure out how to do what they need to in some of the most convoluted way because they are familiar only with a minimal subset of language features. well, that argument doesn't quite work with fortran because it is a minimal language in some sense. and the prevailing attitude is the "i just have to make it work now, and i'll only use it once".
anything to make fortran more maintainable is usually down to the coder. a matter of convention not enforced by the compiler.
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