Description of old FORTRAN idioms

@TomBeam FYI Winteracter was discontinued at the end of Oct 2024, there is a separate thread on this discourse.

As an “old Fortran idiom” myself, this definitely looks like a “house of cards” to me. However, unlike other additions to Fortran over the last several years, structured programming wasn’t a “house of cards” :smile:

I still have to incorporate some stuff from wspector in the booklet :innocent: But I do welcome corrections, additions and other suggestions. While I am happy with the current standard, I do appreciate the insights from yesteryear in programming. Despite appearances to the contrary, software engineering is one area where history is oft forgotten.

A couple of suggested updated:

Section 2.2:
An asterisk in column 1 to start a comment line was standardised in Fortran 77 - see section 3.2.1 of that Standard.

And statement labels can go anywhere in columns 1-5 (not 2-5 as you said). One does sometimes come across old code where a statement label of 99999 has been used.

In Section 8.2 on Direct Access Files you say there was no way to know what unit size the compiler was using. But since Fortran 90 there has been a special form of the INQUIRE statement in which one supplied a token record and the statement returned the appropriate length to use in an OPEN statement to use it.

Thank you - I will incorporate these comments. I do need to make a planning, a belated new year’s resolution.