I guess a reference to this ACM article should not be left out. It discusses alternative control structures perhaps best known from the INTERCAL language, but from a FORTRAN point of view (it predates Fortran 90). Here is the link: STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING CONSIDERED HARMFUL
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This sounds creepy. It should’ve been the soundtrack for the Fallout video games.
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A really creepy version is the one sang by HAL 9000, a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series:
Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, HAL’s consciousness degrades. HAL finally reverts to material that was programmed into him early in his memory, including announcing the date he became operational as 12 January 1992 (in the novel, 1997). When HAL’s logic is completely gone, he begins singing the song “Daisy Bell” and starts slowing down and changing pitch similar to an old electronic game running low on batteries (in actuality, the first song sung by a computer, which Clarke had earlier observed at a text-to-speech demonstration).
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Last year or so I found this interesting thesis from 1988 named “A computer program for the installation of blading in a turbomachinery rotor resulting in minimum unbalance” by Yardimoglu, Ali Riza. It features listing of about 900 lines of Fortran 77 code. After correcting typos made by the OCR, I was surprised to find out that GFortran was able to compile the code without any problems.
I think the problem that this code is trying to solve is interesting. The code itself has a lot of GOTO statements and as such is quite difficult to understand.
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Real Programmers aren’t afraid to use GOTOs.
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This is absolutely gorgeous paper! Lot of fun!
Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program.
This has made memories come to my mind of my Master’s thesis, done on a PDP-11 machine in 1982. We occasionally did use those keys on the front panel, as seen at the very bottom of the following picture (taken from Wikipedia)
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“Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.”
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One of my favorite Fortran related quotes goes something like this (It was a long time ago when I first read it so I don’t remember the exact quote and its source so I’m paraphraseing. If someone remembers the exact quote and the source please share)
A million years from now when humanity finally succeeds in destroying itself and roaches evolve out of the rubble to become the dominant intelligent life form on the planet, the first programming language they develop will look a lot like Fortran
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My favorite, and I also forget the source:
I don’t know what the programming language of the future will look like, but I know that it will be called Fortran.
- forgotten
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Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)
Wikipedia on the eponymous company founder:
In 2020, Forbes ranked him as the sixteenth-richest person in the
world, with an estimated net worth of $48 billion as of April 7,
2020 and as of July 21, 2020, Bloomberg ranked 8th in Forbes 400
with net worth $60.1 billion.
I have used a Bloomberg terminal. The interface looks like DOS but is fast and functional.
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Sometime in the 1984-1985 timeframe I had the priveledge of hearing Seymour Cray speak at a conference banquet. He talked about the development of the Cray 1. Its a long time ago but two things I remember him saying were.
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When he got his electical engineering degrees he never thought he would spend more time dealing with plumbing and cooling issues than he would with circuit design.
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Cray spent as nearly as much money developing the first Cray Fortran compiler as they did developing the vector processing hardware.
Who knows where Fortran would be now if Intel, Nvidia etc. spent as much money on compiler development as they do on bringing a new processor to market. Maybe they do but the amount of money you spend on developing something is usually reflected in the quality and reliability of the end product. I don’t know about others but I don’t see it.
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Intel makes its money on hardware and will invest accordingly. I am grateful that Intel has given me a free Fortran 2018 compiler for both Windows and Linux. Yesterday I ran my first program using coarrays. I wonder what the specific complaints about Intel Fortran are.
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I wonder what the specific complaints about Intel Fortran are.
Actually I have more issues with Nvidia/PGI but Intel still has a bad habit of new releases breaking code that has worked for years with previous versions of the Intel compiler with optimization turned on (and sometimes off). My most recent hiccup was code that gave me the wrong answer with optimization turned completely off (and I know the code was correct) but gave me the correct answer when I upped the optimization level. That’s opposite of what I usually encounter with optimization.
Nvidia/PGI is a lost cause. An issue I reported about 3 years ago still hasn’t been fixed. I guess they are waiting for LLVM Flang to reach maturity but so far Flang is no better than vaporware.
I guess my overall issue is I’m old and grew up with Fortran compilers that never and I mean never gave you ICEs etc. I wrote thousands of lines of code for about 20 years before I encountered an ICE. Yes they were not asked to do the level of optimization and support the features modern compilers do but to me any ICE is just a sign no one wanted to spend the money to do the level of testing thats required to make sure they never happen.
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From that article on Algorithmic Music:
http://articles.ircam.fr/textes/Andreatta11b/index.pdf
Automatic translation of page 19 (by DeepL):
With Nicolas Viel, a third period began in 1975, when Barbaud joined the Institut de recherche en informatique et automatique (IRIA). This period begins with the creation of the BBK group, named after the three composers who make it up. (Pierre Barbaud, Frank Brown and Geneviève Klein), and is characterized by a radicalization of the algorithmic approach. Now, with the exception of Saturnia Tellus (1980), for tape, a government order requested by the GERM and carried out at the Institute National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), all non instrumental works will be collective works, generated, for the greater part, from computer programs written in Fortran. Example 6 shows an excerpt from one of the programs used for the realization of Terra incognita ubi sunt leones (1975), for tape.
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50 Years of Pascal
By Niklaus Wirth
Communications of the ACM, March 2021, Vol. 64 No. 3, Pages 39-41
…
But in my opinion Algol W was not perfectly satisfactory. It still contained too many compromises, having emerged from a committee. After my return to Switzerland, I designed a language after my own preferences: Pascal. Together with a few assistants, we wrote a user manual and constructed a compiler. In the course of it, we had a dire experience. We intended to describe the compiler in Pascal itself, then translate it manually to Fortran, and finally compile the former with the latter. This resulted in a great failure, because of the lack of data structures (records) in Fortran, which made the translation very cumbersome. After this unfortunate, expensive lesson, a second try succeeded, where in place of Fortran the local language Scallop (M. Engeli) was used.
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A series of blog posts “Forty Years of Computer Languages” starts with The Old FORTRAN. It compares assembly language on the Eniac to Fortran code and recounts the author’s experience with FORTRAN.
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