[Info-vax] Fortran

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/6/18 9:12 AM, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <pu5uc4$n43$1 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes:
>> On 2018-12-03, Galen <gltackett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Probably a GE die-hards still using the three-branch IF as well? ;-)
>>
>> I really hope there's no-one bemoaning the demise of Hollerith constants. :-)
> 
>     The 300,000 lines of code I talked about originally had character
>     strings initialized by coding the hex values of EBCDIC characters.
>     Odd, since every compiler we had access to, and some of the oldest
>     code in the system, accepted quoted strings.  Not particularly
>     portable, either.
> 

You want to hear about fun Fortran code, try this....

In a past lifetime I worked at the US Military Academy at
West Point.  I did COBOL/DMS programs for the Admissions
Department.  One day they asked if I knew Fortran and, of
course, I did.  They gave me some programs to work on. You
have tor realize that West Point is a college unlike any
other college.  The classes stop for the summer but the
Professors are Army Officers and don't just get the summer
off like other Professors.  Apparently one year they asked
a bunch of Professors to write some programs to do work
for the Admissions Department.  Well, being an engineering
school you can guess what their primary programming language
was.  They wrote a bunch of administrative programs in
Fortran.  None of the civilians (or any of the other Military
programmers knew anything about Fortran.  So, I got the
job.  You would think the solution would have been to
just redo them in COBOL, but no, they wanted them maintained
as written, in Fortran.  Some very interesting code, to say
the least.  Being thew only multi-lingual programmer there
I got lots of cool assignments.  COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, BASIC,
CTS, and a number of Assemblers.  Later, when IO moved on
to be a Systems Programmer rather than an Applications Programmer
I added PL/I Subset G, CPL, Algol, C, APL, SPL and a few I have
already forgotten.  Those were the days.  Nothing more intriguing
than programs written by engineers, though.

bill