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

[Craig A. Berry]

On 4/13/22 6:54 PM, Bob Gezelter wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 13, 2022 at 7:05:00 PM UTC-4, 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.
> Craig,
> 
> FORTRAN II (IBM 1620, circa 1960, 20K digits of storage) had full subroutines and functions.

OK.  I read the Wikipedia article wrong, specifically with regard to
functions and subroutines.  The fact they had them doesn't mean they
were used.

> Admittedly, many of these codes were not written to modern
> engineering standards, but one can decode them. Been there, done that (both in
> modern times, and when I was an undergraduate).

Right.  And of course you can decode a 40,000-line program with no
comments and 6-digit identifiers.  But it's work.  Arguably not worth
the effort 10 years after they were written, much less 50.