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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/13/2022 7:04 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 
> 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.

Fortran 66 was available for most of that period.

Fortran IV is mostly the same as Fortran 66.

And functions and subroutines was (per public sources - before
my time) added in Fortran II in 1958.

So not quite as bad.

Anything text sucked big time in Fortran IV/66 but climate
model should not be impacted by that.

Arne