Re: Redefining a numeric constant in Fortran

From: Richard Maine (nospam_at_see.signature)
Date: 01/17/05 

Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 22:47:48 -0800

beliavsky@aol.com writes:

> Was this (the ability to redefine the value of '7') ever really true of
> Fortran, or a particular Fortran compilers?

It was never true of Fortran the language. It was common behavior for
many Fortran compilers in the presense of a oparticular style of
nonstandard code.

In those days, people often didn't distinguish between the language
and a particular compiler. Many people didn't even know that there
was such a thing as a standard; they just considered the language
to be defined by whatever compiler they were using at the time.
(Of course, some still work in that mode, but in those days it was
almost everyone).

In training new Fortran programers, I used to "lead" them into making
the error of changing a constant so that I could point it out. I
figured it was better for them to encounter the strange symptoms while
"under supervision" as it were.

In a way, it was almost a disappointment when this error started
generating error messages about things like trying to modify
read-only memory or something of the sort. That made the debugging
so much simpler that my help was scarcely needed. :-) 

-- 
Richard Maine
email: my last name at domain
domain: summertriangle dot net

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