OT Antivirus software

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I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations but fail to recognize the above complaint???

I also enjoyed Forth ...did many systems in robotics and other embedded or real time monitoring control from early 80s through mid-90s. Had opportunity to meed Chuck several times at ORNL--a interesting and impressive fella...

Ahead of me, also...I was just getting out of HS in '63 and didn't get to touch the IBM 1620 as freshman back then...had a full semester of hand-coding starting w/ binary, then machine language to prepare us for FORTRAN coding forms... :)

DEFINITELY!!

The proper use of FORTH is writing floating-point emulators.

So says the Bible.

"Go FORTH, and multiply"

My first computer was the Burroughs E101, an externally programmed clank which was about the size of a desk and did about as much. At UCLA in the early 60's, the Math dept. had the SWAC with a 1401 (?) front end and the Fortran club used the WDPC IBM7090 which was state of the art. Jeez, some of the hardware of the time was nearly psychotic. glork, j4

It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about the limit.

Same reaction here. Of course you had to use DIMENSION and EQUIVALENCE statements, but simple variables could be used without decaratives. Some versions even set all data to zero when the program started, so you wouldn't get the undefined values problem.

The best thing that ever happened to Fortran was Ratfor.

BTW, I really like C's use of functions and absence of subroutines. The Modcomp realtime minis I used to use a lot had Fortran interfaces to system functions that looked like:

CALL XYZ( A,B,C,D,.TRUE.,.TRUE.,.FALSE., ... .TRUE.,0)

I contemplated homicide every time I had to figure out what one of those was actually doing.

Well, to be fair, it's been ...24 years since I took that class, so my memory may be "a bit rusty". I do remember not liking it at all.

There was no requirement for EQUIVALENCE. I'd think only a small fraction of all FORTRAN programs actually used it at all (although, of course, there were/are reasons for needing it).

Non-standard and therefore, not wise if one ever moved platforms...but I've seen a lot of code that relied on the behavior and a lot of errors in comp.lang.fortran because of it... :(

Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)

One can write "write-only" code in any language...Forth has it's practitioners of the art as does every other language.

Some of the most legible code I've ever seen was Forth--of course, it was written by some true experts. I recall an automated loom weaving control program presented at the Rochester Forth Conference some years ago. I was actually like reading a piece of literature for clarity--all one need was a dictionary to understand the English definitions of technical terms for weaving and the whole code was transparent.

Some of Chuck Moore's code was that way as well while other was well, dense might be a good description!

Yes...the first machine after school where I worked (starting in '68) was a Philco TransEra 2000. I most fondly recall the 27 7-track tapes for all external storage! :)

That descriptor was usually applied to APL. where the 'half-life' for readability by the author was about half a day.

When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C, one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.

Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.

After four yrs. of McAfee, tried Norton. Better programs and have stayed virus free since.

Mark & Juanita wrote: ...

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Then I'll wager his C code was no easier to read than his Fortran... :)

Back in the early days, I had at least one job that required writing Cobol programs. I was told my Cobol looked like Fortran :-). Apparently most people didn't even know Cobol had a COMPUTE statement.

BTW, I know COBOL gets a lot of bad press, but it's still one of the easiest languages to get a novice producing working code. Excepting RPG, of course.

And I do have fond memories of the "MOVE CORRESPONDING" statement.

When I was managing programmers I used to get rid of those sorts. No amount of brilliance was worth the pain down the road. I think C tends to bring out those kinds more than other languages, but they show up everywhere. It is that mentality that explains a lot of the garbage running on our systems now.

-- "We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"

Tim Douglass

I'd thought that would be obvious based upon his delight in finding the GOTO statement. :-)