14 Jan
2025
14 Jan
'25
2:34 p.m.
> A bad reason to pick Fortran or C is having been
taught it at school
> and then making no effort to update one's skills at any point in the
> intervening decades.
On Tue, 14 Jan 2025, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
This assumes that your professors are teaching Fortran
66 instead of
Fortran 2025. I'd be interested to know what you believe its defects to
be.
I first taught Fortran in community college in Fall 1983.
In the lab, we used the IBM/Micorosft Fortran, which worked very well for
THAT task, but had some serious deficiencies. A "Sieve of Erastothanes"
compiled in it ran slower than in BASICA. Bob Wallace (who was still at
Microsoft) warned me to avoid the run-time library.
My FORTRAN experience was from fifteen years prior (PDQ FORTRAN, WATFOR,
and FORTRAN 4?), so, until I managed to catch up, I was teaching my
students to write FORTRAN programs in Fortran77.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com