18 Dec
2007
18 Dec
'07
8:34 p.m.
From: Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com>
I get the basic jist of what you're saying I guess.
Can you a counter example for clarity?
Nope--I'm not going to get nudged for off-topic conversation.
Clearly, FORTRAN has nothing to do with vintage computers.
This is going to sound like a stupid question, but
given it's typical applications - scientific and
engineering - why the need for such speed?
Oh, atomic bomb explosion simulations, predicting tomorrow's weather,
etc. I recall working on a proposal back in the 1970s to supply
systems to ECMWF (look it up). One of the fellows I spoke with said
something to the effect of: "Golly that's great; now if you could
provide us with something about 1000 times faster, we might be able
to figure out if it'll rain tomorrow..."
stupid question. Would a modernish pc port lend
itself
well to writing some kind of modernish game?
Who else besides the world's worst nerds use it? And
along those lines was COBOL used for anything other
then business apps?
I don't know what current implementations of Fortran 2003 are out
there for the PC currently, so I can't comment. My last serious
involvement with FORTRAN was as an alternate on the F90 (we foolishly
called it "FORTRAN 8x" back then. That's optimism for you) vector
extensions working group. Talk about some donnybrooks between
vendors... I haven't really done anything major with FORTRAN since
then and I doubt that I can even understand some of the more exotic
aspects of the most modern dialect (F2008 is due out next year). But
then, ANSI isn't ANSI anymore--it's INCITS and X3J3 is now just J3.
Times change.
Relate to disk archiving? Ok dumb question.
Just the basic sector I/O stuff was assembly; all of the logical
decipherment was FORTRAN. It made the project go much faster without
the verbosity of PL/M.
Oh you don't say. What other languages have
reliable,
presumably floating-point capability today? What's gcc
like? Are there cheap Windoze implements?
I'm talking about the real hard-bitten mathematicians who run a bunch
of data through a vendor's math library and say "Feh--garbage. Let's
write our own." I remember commenting about the routines (in
FORTRAN, of course) in my just-purchased copy of Cody and Waite to a
friend of that persuasion. His face looked about like it would have
if I'dve said "You know, the Yugo is really a very fine luxury car."
It used to be that the FORTRAN mathlibs at places like Los Alamos and
Lawrence Livermore were second to none. Sadly, I don't know if
that's true anymore.
Sigh...back to assembly for now and cursing idiots who still can't
write a decent macro assembler...
Back on topic before I'm castigated.
Cheers,
Chuck