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

[Dave Froble]

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.

What's so hard about GOTo?

Yeah, it can produce disgusting code, but the is a difference between "able to 
read" and "able to follow".

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David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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