18 Dec
2007
18 Dec
'07
11:34 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
19 Dec
19 Dec
5:56 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
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.
For my doctoral work (using a PDP-11 - probably vintage even then -
and a MicroVAX - shiny and new then, definitely on-topic now), I
used the NAG library for all the number crunching.
My son recently did some work experience with them: they now do C
libraries and (it seems) some Java stuff too. Times change I guess.
Back on topic before I'm castigated.
Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a solution to the perennial
"is this system on-topic in and of itself". If it can run Java then
"no"
:-).
Antonio
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20 Dec
20 Dec
2:42 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Antonio Carlini once stated:
Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a solution to the perennial
"is this system on-topic in and of itself". If it can run Java then
"no"
:-).
Might have to have the List Wizard chime in here, but my first Java
project [1] was done over ten years ago.
-spc (Java sucked back then too ... )
[1] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html
7:26 a.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Antonio Carlini once
stated:
On Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 it seems, so off-topic in and of
themselves.
So the putative can-it-run-Java rule may have something going for it
after all !
Antonio
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19/12/2007 19:37
Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a solution to the
perennial "is this system on-topic in and of itself". If it can run
Java then "no" :-).
Might have to have the List Wizard chime in here, but my first Java
project [1] was done over ten years ago.
3:15 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Antonio Carlini once stated:
Sean Conner wrote:
Not quite so fast---it also ran on Solaris 8-P
It was thus said that the Great Antonio Carlini
once stated:
On Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 it seems, so off-topic in and of
themselves.
Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a solution to the
perennial "is this system on-topic in and of itself". If it can run
Java then "no" :-).
Might have to have the List Wizard chime in here, but my first Java
project [1] was done over ten years ago. So the putative can-it-run-Java rule may have
something going for it
after all !
May.
-spc (Well ... in theory anyway ... )
9:30 a.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Antonio Carlini once
stated:
Yeah, my first commercial one was in the latter half of 1996. (It was all
client-server stuff and well over a million lines of code. Definitely one of
the bigger Java projects out there back then - which meant we had Sun trying
to throw Java-related hardware at us for evaluation, and boy did that stuff suck)
Perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled across a
solution to the perennial
"is this system on-topic in and of itself". If it can run Java then
"no"
:-).
Might have to have the List Wizard chime in here, but my first Java
project [1] was done over ten years ago. -spc (Java sucked back then too ... )
I didn't mind it back then - for real-world problems I was seeing around 90%
performance against native languages anyway, and so the language benefits and
ability to run on diverse hardware were real pluses.
Sun really lost the plot with the language in the late 90s when they tried to
appeal to the web generation though, and began preaching to people over how
they should create their apps. Bleh (kind of the software equivalent of
"everything is a PC").
cheers
J.
11:23 a.m.
New subject: FORTRAN 50th Anniversary was RE: have you seen www.fortran.com?
Brief piece on the BBC about FORTRAN's 50th anniversary at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/digital_planet.shtml
featuring Paul McJones of CHM.
The Fortran segment starts at about 19m38s into the show.
Happy Holidays!
Lee Courtney
(user of FORTRAN II on the IBM 1620-II, FORTRAN-IV on Sigma-7)
6060
days inactive
6061
days old
6 comments
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participants (5)
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arcarlini＠iee.org -
cclist＠sydex.com -
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Lee.Courtney＠windriver.com -
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