How Not to Write FORTRAN in Any Language

gManZboy writes "In an article that's sure to p/o Fortran programmers, Donn Seeley has assembled a rant that posits there are characteristics of good coding that transcend all programming languages, except Fortran. Seriously though, his point is that early FORTRAN made coding ugly. Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code. Though Fortran has in recent years overcome its early challenges, the point -- 'Don't write FORTRAN' (i.e. ugly stuff) -- still applies."

Comments

FORTRAN - The ugly but lovable little SOB

[ChuckleBug]

When I took computer programming in high school, it was all FORTRAN. We used a wonderfully dry textL FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV. We didn't have any sort of microcomputer (this was 1980, and we were behind the times even then), but we had a keypunch, so we'd write code on a form, punch cards, rubber band 'em together, and send them off to be run on the district's big iron. Then you'd wait a week and get back a few sheet of green and white striped paper with ***SYNTAX ERROR*** all over it. And we liked it that way!

Although that was a toothache of a programming experience, I have never lost this bizarre fondness I have for that ugly, unwieldy, but somehow cool FORTRAN. Writing that stuff makes you feel like you're talking the language of a retro-scifi computer, like the ones in the original Star Trek that spoke in that odd mechanical monotone. Robby the Robot had to
have been programmed in FORTRAN (and NO he was NOT a guy in a suit! I'm not listening! La la la!).

At any rate, old-fashioned FORTRAN may deserve to be bashed, but I can't help shedding a tear.

Re:FORTRAN - The ugly but lovable little SOB

[Lodragandraoidh]

I just had a flashback to 1981...

My highschool offered its first computer science course, and I took the first class.

We had Apple computers running Basic, NEC (or was it NCR?) machines running Fortran, 2 terminals and a printer/terminal connected to a mini computer at school district headquarters.

I don't recall the specifics of the version of fortran - all I recall is you would actually boot the machine into a fortran interpreter, then you would type in your program by hand and run it. We might have been able to save our application onto a 5 1/4" floppy disk not sure...

The only printer was the terminal - so if you wanted a printout, you had to login via terminal/printer and output your program contents (provided you had typed it in previously and saved it) and/or run it to capture the output. I want to say the system could run both basic and fortran applications - so access to the printer/terminal was always tight - particularly if a project was due.

This was my first experience with a time-sharing system - we had quotas - that if we went over the number of hours alotted we would be denied access. The eggheads in our group loved the mini and tuned up their noses at the little micros in the lab.

I played dungeon (precursor to the Zork trilogy)on the county's computer, in addition to doing my assigned tasks, and spent many hours in the computer room after school. I recall one kid claiming to have changed his grades on that machine (apparently all of our grades were entered in the mini through terminals in the school office) - but I never validated that.

We did a lot of flow charts and wrote our programs out before entering them in the system (or we were supposed to). Just glad we did not have to deal with paper tape/punch cards - although punch cards were to revisit me in a few years (I unintentionally played 52 card pick-up with a deck of them when delivering them to a data center - but that is another story).

I wonder what kind of programming classes are available in highschools today? My daughter took a course involving HTML and CSS markup - but I don't recall seeing any programming classes on her curriculum. Are kids learning java/perl/python like we learned basic/fortran?

Learning It?

[Klar]

Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code.
I mostly program in C, Java,php and C++(and several other languages that I dont use as much), and am always interested in picking up new languages to play around with. Is Fortran worth learning? And are there any things that it does a lot better than other languages?

FORTAN programs are small right?

[FriedTurkey]

Isn't FORTRAN used these days primarily to figure out mathematical and engineering calculations? I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people. So does it matter if it is ugly? I am sure there are FORTRAN libraries to access databases but how many are really large programs??

I have had to make changes to UNIX shell scripts and PERL code before. Most of the undocumented cryptic scripts were small enough to figure out what I needed to change.

A great programming language

[toddbu]

Back in the good old days before C/C++ was popular, FORTRAN was a great programming language for doing anything that had to do with math or bit manipulation. The alternatives were things like COBOL or Pascal. What I loved about FORTRAN was that you could do cool things like treat strings as ints or do negative subscripting to rewrite the OS. I had a graphics class that I wrote some FORTRAN code in because I could break down a matrix into a single row just by passing in a pointer. I loved the fact that everything was pass by reference, which is why it took me so long to switch to C. If you had an optimizing compiler you could do stuff like make 1 == 2 because the constant value 1 was mapped to the same memory location for all instances and if you passed the constant into a function then you change the constant value inside the function.

I prided myself in college that I could write FORTRAN in any language. I had a prof that couldn't figure out why I was doing bit manipulation in COBOL. (Yes, this can be done in COBOL through multiplication and division, but it's really ugly.)

Yes, older languages can be ugly...

[Richard Steiner]

...but it's still quite possible to write readable and modular code even in Fortran 66.

(I'm saying this as a programmer who spent 12 of the past 15 years doing exactly that -- writing and maintaining Fortran 66 code that was part of a critical production system at a major airline).

As with any language, the onus is on the programmer who is writing the code to organize it and implement it in a way which is easy for subsequent programmers to follow and understand.

We were able to do it even within the limits and conventions present in the environment (external variable/parameter references limited to six (6) characters, internal references limited to either five (5) or one (1) character, subroutine names limited to six characters) by using common sense and trying to use a consistent coding style.

Yes, arithmetic IFs are ugly, computed GOTO statements can be confusing, and strings defined using Hollerith notation are strange to folks who haven't seen it before, and programs are hard to follow when everything is lined up neatly in column 7 without any spacing between code and comments. So don't use that style, avoid confusing notation, and refrain from using confusing syntax or statements which might make the intent of the program unclear.

It's the same advice in any languages -- cute tricks might save a few bytes or clock cycles, but in a production environment it's usually long-term MAINTAINABILITY that counts -- and that's true in *any* language!

Re:Yes, older languages can be ugly...

[AJWM]

You left out whitespace being meaningless and implicit declaration of variables -- which can lead to things like

DO 10 I = 1.10

unexpectedly assigning 1.10 to the new variable DO10I instead of starting a do-loop with I as the loop variable, ranging from 1 to 10. (Which, for the non FORTRAN cogniscenti, would be

DO 10 I = 1,10

where the first 10 is the label of the end of the loop)

Which led to the loss of a space probe, back in the day.

hardly unfortunate

[hawk]

For certain purposes (including most of what I do), fortran is unmatched.

It is *possible* to write C that runs as fast as Fortran for heavy math. However, it involves hand-optimizing your C until this happens.

Fortran handles calculations quite well, thank you. It take less Fortran code to handle many common operations, and array options are built in and optimized to high heaven.

With Fortran 90 and 95, the grammars that led to the CS horror (e.g., computed gotos) are marked either deleted or obsolescent (meaning expect deletion in another standard or two).

Also, due to the selection of which features are included in Fortran and which are not, Fortran compilers can make much stronger assumptions than, for example, C compilers working with pointers.

There's nothing unfortunate at all about Fortran's (not FORTRAN any more) role in scientific computing. The tragedy is the number of people who bought into those silly C campaigns.

hawk

Re:Nothing for you to see here, please move along.

[Rei]

Certainly, you can write poorly in any language. But you can't necessarily do the opposite.

For example, I initially resisted C++. I viewed it as poorly designed objects on C (after experiencing the beautifully done objects of LPC), and programming examples for it made objects of things that never should have been objects - and as such I wanted nothing to do with it.

However, the other features of C++ ended up proving themselves infinitely useful, and since the value of C++ objects has shot up notably in my mind. Examples:

Templates: I can't even imagine how many pieces of code I wrote before C++ in which I wrote different versions of the same function for different variable types. Talk about a maintainance nightmare :P

Const correctness: I remember resisting this like crazy, because it makes initial programming harder. But not only does it offer some serious benefits to the compiler at optimization time, but it's saved me many times from errors and really helped with code cleanup and refactoring into functions. My only real problem with it, now, is programmers who don't const their libraries, thus preventing me from consting variables that I need to pass to them at each step of the way.

Destructors: I don't think I need to even get into why having your variables clean up their memory when they go out of scope is probably the best thing that ever happened concerning fighting memory leaks. You can also do garbage collection with smart pointers, but that's a topic for some other time and is less standard.

std::vector: I can't believe that I used to not only have to clean up variable size arrays before, but used to have to have each array contain three variables - the pointer, the count of elements, and the allocated size - all of which would need to be checked and adjusted at each insertion and deletion.

std::string: A lot easier to use than C's unwieldy strings, and easy to convert to and from regular C strings.

I could go on for a long time... a good language can save you many programming headaches if you're willing to learn it.