Colin Roald

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since March 27, 1999

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March 27, 1999, on Web Nerd Bookshelf:
This is a fairly minor comment, but perhaps Mr Mueller is not the only one confused by philg's reference to FORTRAN II---apparently its infamy has faded enough that non-scientists these days don't appreciate the gut horror it's supposed to inspire. FORTRAN 77 is wretched enough: silent errors if you happen to type more than 72 characters on a line, function calls that don't even check if they've been handed the right *number* of arguments, never mind of the right types, etc, etc. And while I've been spared the experience myself, I have watched an officemate try to decipher 1965-vintage FORTRAN IV, where the principal control structure was the computed GOTO (and the program was written by a guy who thought things like llo10, note *very* carefully, made good variable names). I have never had to deal with FORTRAN II, and I hope never to face the experience, except maybe in some twisted CS carnival House of Horrors.