[Info-vax] [OT] Current students apparently can't read Fortran code...

[Craig A. Berry]

On 4/13/22 3:10 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>  From https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/13/climate_mit_fortran/
> 
> |CLiMA made the determination that old climate models, many of which were
> |built 50 years ago and coded in Fortran, had to go if there was going to be
> |any progress toward better climate models. Now that he's working at MIT on
> |the CGC project, he's realized that "traditional climate models are in a
> |language [MIT] students can't even read."
> 
> Can't read the latest symbol-based (instead of word-based) language
> without lots of study ? Ok, that's a fair thing to say.
> 
> But Fortran ??? Wow.

Um, the code written in the 1960s and 1970s as mentioned in the article
was probably not Fortran 77 or even Fortran 66.  Unless I'm in a Star
Trek episode and 1977 actually came before the 1960s and most of the
1970s.  Fortran IV was limited to 6-character identifiers and used
Hollerith constants. Functions and subroutines were not available so you
would tend to see programs tens of thousands of lines long with GOTO all
over the place.  It was unreadable to me when learning VAX Fortran in
1983, so I can sympathize with someone who knows C++ or Java trying to
make sense of it now.