Date: 17 Feb 2002 10:48:28 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: "freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Fortran (was Re: Why is Python slower on FreeBSD than Windows?) Message-ID: <xcwuxceygz.uxc@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20020216134025.01cfd980@localhost> References: <20020215145841.O33755-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> <3C6D22C2.268E6915@pythonemproject.com> <20020215145841.O33755-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> <4.3.2.7.2.20020216134025.01cfd980@localhost>
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Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> writes: > At 07:23 PM 2/15/2002, Adrian Wontroba wrote: > > >"Real Programmers can write Fortran in any language." To quote from an > >old, and quite funny, list of things that Real Programmers do and don't > >do. > > > >It was my first language. Fortunately I was soon introduced to Algol. > > Funny thing about Algol: When Algol-60 (which had some features that > neither FORTRAN nor C has, such as range and bounds checking) for > UNIVAC hardware was completed, scientists at Case Institute > of Technology (where I did my undergraduate degree) ported some old > government code over and tried to run it. The machine immediately > reported runtime errors. Variables were undefined; subscripts were > going out of bounds; the results that were produced if the errors > were ignored were virtually random. > > And now the punch line: the code they'd ported had been used in > the design of nuclear weapons. > > I trust neither FORTRAN nor C to this day. As someone with lots of FORTRAN experience, some with old FORTRAN and porting, it's easy to guess that the FORTRAN-to-Algol porters failed to understand what was going on in the FORTRAN program. Genius (and other) level scientists and engineers, working to deadlines in environments that placed no merit on readability or any other "good" coding standards, can generate FORTRAN that nobody but them can understand before the need has passed. And these guys were usually smart enough to check their work for reasonableness (eg, with sliderules) or by other methods. I've checked old code by eye and with analysers and found lots of problems and a lot more things that looked like problems until closer examination revealed them to not be errors or to not matter much. With one big port (between CPUs and FORTRAN versions), the stuff was just so full of horrors that I knew I couldn't understand it well enough to maintain it and was allowed to redevelop most of it from scratch, getting a new program that produced essentially the same results as the old. No doubt much such coding was full of real, significant errors, but it usually takes a great deal of work to prove that one way or the other. Surely better languages and code design/coding practices would have helped, but I (and other several other engineers I've known) have come to believe that the old timers knew the math and physics of what they were doing better than us youngsters who tend to spend too much of our efforts worring about programming issues. The trustworthiness of the developers can be more important than the trustworthiness of the language they use. Both are important. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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