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

[David Jones]

Old Fortran has oddities like arithmetic ifs and computed gotos (I was told logical IFs didn't show up until IV). My roommate is college had a cursory knowledge of Fortran from his engineering classes, but had never heard of equivalence statements. I got flummoxed the first (and only) time I encountered alternate return points in a function call. They are as nasty as assigned gotos.

I helped a co-worker once suss out the character manipulation being done Fortran on a CDC machine (10 6-bit characters stuffed into a 60 bit word).