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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/13/2022 9:27 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 
> 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.

I am pretty sure that they were a hit.

:-)

Arne