Was talking just last weekend about Fortran with my dad and a friend of
his. They used it back in the '60s with those punch cards etc. First I've
heard he almost did programming back then, citing it to be similar to flow
charting. He was a finance manager and later became manager of the
internationl space station at Boeing before retiring.
I had visited his workplace in Florida as a kid and was shown the computer
room, what a monstrosity of archaic machines, although at the time it was
like a peek into the future for me. I did a bit of Fortran in a computing
class in high school circa '77. Strange typewriter-sized machine that used
punchcards as input and had only a orange LED display to show plots of
equations, formula, functions we gave it. We were apparently behind the
times there I think.


Marc Schimmler wrote:
> 
> Hi Alain!
> 
> Your absoutly right about FORTRAN. I maintain 8MB of Fortran 77 code (a
> FEM code for static, dynamic mechanical problems and CFD) and every time
> I run into a problem I have to search for day to track the error down
> (in most cases not mine but those of the original authors). Especially
> common blocks can be nasty and more so when single and double numbers
> are stored in the same block. What can happen there .....
> 
> I still think that FORTRAN is unavoidable for high computation of
> numerical problems. All the high computing languages for the CRAY or NEC
> I've seen were derivates of FORTRAN.
> 
> Besides I'm learning C++. I did some ADA 83/95 too and I liked it but it
> is not supported like C or C++ are.
> 
> It's still funny not to be the only one in the world that has to fight
> with the limitations of FORTRAN.
> 
> Marc
> --
> Marc Schimmler

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