Re: one-liner for characater replacement

analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 29, 10:23 pm, "James Giles" <jamesgi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
....
I have no particular love form many of the changes rto the language
since F90 (in fact, my public review of F90 recommended that
it not be approved - for reasons I still consider valid). But I don't
see any of your recommendations even coming up to that standard.

What is stopping you from observing that it the Fortran written using
"error-prone" features (before the dying off period of early 1970s -
late 1980s) that has the best chance of survival going forward?

A <= X <= B is from before 1970??? Adopting Excel graphics
is a pre-1907's idea??? SQL array ops are pre-1970's??? Make
up your mind.

But all this "saving the programmer from himself" mentality is not
going to help when both test1 and test2 have been dutifully declared
in fortran 90s puke-making style ("real kind allocatable :: whatever")
and the programmer calls a subprogram with test1 in the argument when
he intended test2.

Same error possible with pre-1970's Fortran. Sorry, no points given
for examples where your alternative is not an advantage.

Implicit typing allows for idiom and continuity of style. [...]

So does any language. Adopt a better idiom and you'll have even
better style.

Its such alleged warts of f77 that actually led to its phenomenal
success and it was destroyed by a language (C) that had no safety net
for the programmer at all (at least back in the dying off period of
Fortran - I wouldn't be surprised if the custodians of C are now
tyring to kill it by making it "safe".).

Yet C *doesn't* have implicit typing. Hmm. Evidently not the
panacea you're making it out to be.

I think you would be a fun subject in those productivity experiments
they used to do in the 1970's. No matter what they were testing, one
pattern emerged over and over again: the subjects of the experiment
(the programmers themselves) were *least* qualified to predict
what features would hurt or enhance their own productivity. Time
and again, the feature the programmers *liked* was the one that
they were *least* productive with. That lead to one of my favorite
sayings (which some even attribute to me): programmers don't like
their favorite programming language "warts and all", they like the
warts best.

In any case, the phenominal success of Fortran might have more
to do with the fact that it was the first high-level, platform independent
language and that it was promoted by the largest computing company
in the world (the latter by a very large margin - like all other companies
cumulatively would still have been smaller than IBM). I've never
noticed any correlation between popularity and quality.

C became popular because both it and UNIX were free and open-
source when nearly all the colleges and universities in the world
were looking for cheap ways to get a CS department started.
I never heard anyone praise either for quality in those days. That
only started when the departments began to be run by the first set
of CS graduates (who had almost no experience outside of C
and UNIX). Once again, the advantages of being first (the first
widespread teaching environment) and the advantages of being
promoted by powerful organization(s) (lots of universities in
this case) had a lot more to do with the popularity of the language
than any issue of quality.

--
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare


.

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