[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...FORTRAN

[Chris Elmquist]

On Wednesday (03/04/2009 at 07:56AM -0000), Craig Sawyers wrote:
> > FORTRAN.  What version is it up to these days?
> 
> Ah, Fortran.  I used FORTRAN 66 (and later 77) and ALGOL 68 at university.
> That kind of dates me.  And yes, I programmed using punch cards.  You used
> to see folks walking around with huge trays of many hundreds of these things
> on their way to computer reception.  The ICL machine had a 32k core store.
> If you thought you needed more than 16k for your run you had to supply an
> authorisation letter from your supervisor.
> 
> Ah - happy days.  Not ;-)

Wow...   ya.  That is a another huge difference in today's world where
many shops have interactive access to these systems and you just telnet
or ssh to them and edit, compile, debug right on the very system the
job will run.

FORTRAN is "up to" 95 I think in mainstream use now. Although 95 was a
minor revision over 90 and I think many people still think in terms of
FORTRAN90.  Lots of shops have their own preprocessing codes though too
and I've heard of a big weather model that is coded in object oriented
FORTRAN.

This page,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

talks about 2003 and 2008 revisions but I can't say I hear too many people
talking about needing features from those revisions.  On the other hand,
I'm not an apps guy--  I hang out in the guts of the machine and believe
it is only important to run the operating system and apps are someone else's
problem :-)

Chris