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On 15/09/2014 11:00, Peter Humphrey wrote: |
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> On Monday 15 September 2014 07:21:18 Alan McKinnon wrote: |
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> |
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>> I believe Fortran is still very much alive and well in engineering and |
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>> physics - 40 years of number crunching code doesn't just go away by itself |
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> |
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> Confirmed. (Remember Blake's Seven?) It's the main application language in a |
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> multimillion-pound grid control system I was involved with 20 years ago. |
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> Fortran 66, that is, not 90. Nine other languages were used too - even |
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> including Pascal or something like it. Just the mainframes cost millions. |
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> |
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My favourite Fortran story: |
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One of the Mariner spacecraft yonks ago was sent a routine regular |
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course correction. It flew off at some wild angle and was never seen |
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again, and because the antenna was pointing in the wrong direction comms |
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could not be re-established. Oops. Expensive spacecraft down the drain.... |
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The bug was eventually trace to a comma instead of a period in some |
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Fortran code (made a huge difference). Note that many code reviews |
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missed the bug, and the compiler accepted it as valid syntax |
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>> I could go on, but you get the idea :-) |
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> |
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> What, you? :-) |
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> |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |
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