[Tfug] Note of Passage

[erich]

Fortran is alive and well,

    There are, (especially scientific), applications that have
source in Fortran. I have to re-build my gcc compiler with the fortran
USE flag enabled in order to work with some applications.

    No, I don't eat quiche, (It's too salty for me), but I have programmed
in Pascal. Borland Turbo Pascal, (Remember them?) I liked the speed
with which it compiled (On a 386). It seemed much faster and more
efficient than a MS C compiler that I had at my disposal at the time.

    This was in the days of DOS when we had to "shoe-horn"  everything
into 640K using overlays.

    We should be reminded from this that computer technology never
really dies even though the people that invent it are mortal.Why
DOS is still alive too. See:

                      http://www.drdos.com/

                                                           Erich

Jim Secan wrote:

>At 03:00 PM 3/20/2007 -0700, you wrote:
>  
>
>>>For all you (us) dinosaurs lurking on this list, slashdot reports that
>>>John
>>>W. Backus, leader of the IBM team that developed FORTRAN, has died.  As
>>>one
>>>who writes 80-90% of his code in FORTRAN, who has been known to dream in
>>>FORTRAN (nightmare?), and still has a FORTRAN 80-column coding pad
>>>(somewhere), I mark his passing as that of a old friend.
>>>      
>>>
>>Possibly a better known reference to John Backus is the Backus-Naur form
>>(BNF) that is used to describe programming language grammars.  There is
>>nary a CS student who has not heard of it.
>>    
>>
>
>Which would lead me directly to the well-known rant "Real Programmers Don't
>Each Quiche (or Use Pascal)".  J. Backus' FORTRAN is "real programmer"
>stuff, BNF is "quiche-eater" stuff.  Truly a man for all seasons.
>
>Jim
>*---------------------*-------------------------------*
>| Jim Secan           | Northwest Research Assoc, Inc |
>| (jim at nwra.com)      | 2455 E. Speedway, Suite 204   |
>| (520) 319-7773      | Tucson, Arizona 85719         |
>*---------------------*-------------------------------*
>
>_______________________________________________
>Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
>Subscription Options:
>http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
>  
>