$640.00 to fill the tanks...

Compared to what else was available at the time, it was good.

Yes, that was the problem. It was good. It kept getting better, and
spaghetti code became ubiquituos. We still need to know Italian.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

FORTRAN has single-handedly set science back ten years. The same is true for HTML and the web.
Howso?

Insomuch as it was good enough to get the job done, while preserving
(and cementing in standards) its atrocious parts. FORTRAN is (for me)
the king of spaghetti code. Though it was common enough before FORTRAN,
the FORTRAN compilers got so good it wasn't worth recoding what was
already done - so things were made to work with it.

The mess we have on the web is due to the original limitations of HTML
(both conceptual and in implementation) and the kludges required to get
around it, and the kludges web designers use to get around the kludges
that get around the original limitations. It will take a revolution to
kill that beast.

The same can be said of many aviation related things (sorry about
bringing the thread back on topic) when it comes to certification
standards. The barriers to innovation are too big, and the system works
"well enough".

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:17:11 GMT, Jose
wrote:

FORTRAN has single-handedly set science back ten years. The same is true for HTML and the web.
Howso?

Insomuch as it was good enough to get the job done, while preserving
(and cementing in standards) its atrocious parts. FORTRAN is (for me)
the king of spaghetti code. Though it was common enough before FORTRAN,
the FORTRAN compilers got so good it wasn't worth recoding what was
already done - so things were made to work with it.

"Before" FORTRAN? That was 1957. (I punched my first dusty deck for
the 1620 in 1963 -- using FORTRAN IV.) COBOL was 1960 and RPG a few
years after that. Before FORTRAN was ML and assembly language. Boy
if you want to talk about bad programming, show me someone who
inserted undocumented assembly routine calls into FORTRAN to show how
cleverly he could take advantage or architectural peculiarities.

Don

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:17:11 GMT, Jose
wrote:
Insomuch as it was good enough to get the job done, while preserving
(and cementing in standards) its atrocious parts. FORTRAN is (for me)
the king of spaghetti code.

Damn, I hate it when someone keeps changing the message subject on a
thread...

FORTRAN does not have to be spaghetti code... Even before they had an
if-then-else structure in the language, we were able to simulate it by
the way that we structured our 'if's and 'go to's... For example:

if (x .lt. 5) go to 100
y = 6
z = 7
go to 200
100 y = 7
z = 8
200 (the next outside the pseudo-if-then-else clause)

Now, since we only had 6 character variable names to work with and
minimal characters on a single line, the above indentations offen did
not occur... All in all, I like 'C'... It is clean and efficient... If
I'm presented with any FORTRAN code these days, I'll convert it to 'C'
if at all possible...

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:45:11 GMT, Matt Whiting
wrote:
You forgot the "s" on character. :-)

Yeah, that too... grin

There was a successor to APL called 'J' that used the ASCII character
set and provided the same functionality as APL... Kind of loses the
flavor of the language when you get rid of all the funky characters
though...

For certain things, I like APL... It makes for a great interactive
calculator... I wish that I had had a laptop with an APL interpreter
on it when I was taking my Linear Algebra course way back in my
undergraduate days... Of course, I don't think that laptops were even
around back then... If there were any, they were the large plasma
screen units that had to be plugged into a wall and still weighed a
ton... I think that were classified as 'portable'... Still, that was
better than the previous generation of Compaqs which were 'lugable' --
basically the size of a suitcase...

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:21:33 GMT, Grumman-581
wrote:

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:13:45 GMT, Jose
wrote:
FORTRAN has single-handedly set science back ten years. The same is
true for HTML and the web.

Compared to what else was available at the time, it was good... Of
course, it doesn't have the character of APL... evil-grin

Doesn't have pointers or linked lists either. :-))
The two most difficult were data base design and working out well
beyond any useful "normal form" and compiler design in straight C
before ANSI C when it did little if any type checking and made the
assumption the programmer knew what he, or she was doing. It'd
basically let you do most any thing with, or to anything.

When I started on my masters at a different university they had the
same course out of the same book, but it was two terms and 8 credit
hours (and a whole lot easier, but they wouldn't let me take it
again). I was the only one in the class who wrote an input scanner
with current and next state arrays. Every one else used logic
statements.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:01:08 GMT, Jose
wrote:

Compared to what else was available at the time, it was good.

Yes, that was the problem. It was good. It kept getting better, and
spaghetti code became ubiquituos. We still need to know Italian.

Spaghetti code? With the introductory courses were allowed the grand
total of *one* goto statement or its equivalent per program.
In higher level we needed to have a good explanation if we used even
one.




Jose
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

Roger wrote:
On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:21:33 GMT, Grumman-581
wrote:


On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:13:45 GMT, Jose
wrote:

FORTRAN has single-handedly set science back ten years. The same is
true for HTML and the web.

Compared to what else was available at the time, it was good... Of
course, it doesn't have the character of APL... evil-grin


Doesn't have pointers or linked lists either. :-))
The two most difficult were data base design and working out well
beyond any useful "normal form" and compiler design in straight C
before ANSI C when it did little if any type checking and made the
assumption the programmer knew what he, or she was doing. It'd
basically let you do most any thing with, or to anything.

Sure it does. You just haven't looked at FORTRAN lately... :-)

Matt

Jose wrote:

FORTRAN has single-handedly set science back ten years. The same is
true for HTML and the web.

Howso?


Insomuch as it was good enough to get the job done, while preserving
(and cementing in standards) its atrocious parts. FORTRAN is (for me)
the king of spaghetti code. Though it was common enough before FORTRAN,
the FORTRAN compilers got so good it wasn't worth recoding what was
already done - so things were made to work with it.

The mess we have on the web is due to the original limitations of HTML
(both conceptual and in implementation) and the kludges required to get
around it, and the kludges web designers use to get around the kludges
that get around the original limitations. It will take a revolution to
kill that beast.

The same can be said of many aviation related things (sorry about
bringing the thread back on topic) when it comes to certification
standards. The barriers to innovation are too big, and the system works
"well enough".

Oh, so you are one who blames poor workmanship on the tools.

Matt

Damn, I hate it when someone keeps changing the message subject on a
thread...

Damn, I hate it when the thread subject bears no relation to the message
itself...

Even before they had an
if-then-else structure in the language, we were able to simulate it

Yes. Goto is extremely powerful. I even used it once in C. But its
ubiquitousness made it very vulnerable (you can go to anywhere - there
is no "come from" statement). When structured programming was made part
of the language, a lot changed - it was much easier to make code that
didn't require grated cheese to be palatable.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.