Remember that Fortran has an arithmetic if statement. You can write
IF (expression) s1, s2, s3where s1, s2 and s3 are labels. If the expression is negative, it jumps to s1. If it’s 0, to s2 and if it’s positive, to s3.
It also has goto variable. You can do
INTEGER a ASSIGN 20 TO a ASSIGN 17 TO a GO TO a 20 PRINT *, "foo" 17 PRINT *, "bar"and it’ll print “bar”. In this snippet of code, everything seems quite logical, but imagine debugging spaghetti code written using these patterns.
Oh, it also has
GO TO (s1, s2, ... , sn), NFirst, N is converted to an integer. If N is 1, it goes to label s1. If N is 2, it goes to s2. If N is less than 1 or greater than n, it does nothing.
Fortran. At least it was comprehensible to a human brain once upon a time. And probably efficiently written.
If you’re good at assembly you’ll be fine once you get past the bad formatting, short names, etc. that was common at that time.
I deal with a code base written in the 90s in a language similar to basic. All the 3 letter variable names drive me crazy
Get a grammar aware formatter and variable renamer, if only to help you understand the code.
Yup for the more complex programs renaming is essential
Yeah really. It would be some tough sledding at first, but it would be far better than looking at some code with some nicely named methods and variables with lots of comments (with emoticons!) for days… only to find out it does absolutely nothing.
Wow you’re right! Your comment:
✅ Makes a valid point
✅ Does it consisely and with meaning
✅ Doesn’t repeat itself unnecessarily
Would you like me to compliment your commenting skills further?
Ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick about bread.
Keep doing it, but add some power verbs and enhance the enthusiasm.
Isn’t it more COBOL than FORTRAN in terms of getting paid?
I thought FORTRAN was pretty much exclusively used via SciPy in research & academia these days.
COBOL is still powering the world economy on mainframes
Code that has lasted, with some maintenance, for 50+ years vs code that doesn’t work from day 1? What advances we have made!
I like Fortran very much, but don’t get me wrong: maintaining Fortran code from 69 must be a huge pain in the ass. It is certainly code written by researchers who have no idea about programming practices. It is sure full of exceptions everywhere, all variables are 2 characters long. The codebase grew over the years and is now several millions lines of code, most of which is the same functionality copied everywhere with slight changes. You have no idea what each subroutine is supposed to do, and it doesn’t help that most algorithms used in there were never published or documented.
I think I’ll go with the vibe coding for this one.
Fortran. always Fortran.
because there’s always more documentation than with vibecode.
