That’s a joke. FORTRAN is unique AFAIK in that it had no constants. You could assign new values to strings like “42” = 327. This leads to horrifying bugs, as you might imagine. The person writing the documentation probably didn’t approve of this misfeature.
-- Doug Weathers http://www.gdunge.com Dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization > On Nov 27, 2019, at 12:21 PM, Gail Lucas via EV <[email protected]> wrote: > > David, am I misinterpreting this or did Xerox actually suggest that pi might > change? I still have FORTRAN manuals but none for Xerox specifically. > > Gail > >> On 11/26/2019 6:44 PM, EVDL Administrator via EV wrote: >> "The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants. >> Instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the >> variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead >> of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the >> program, should the value of pi change." >> -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers > _______________________________________________ > UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub > ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html > INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org > Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA) > _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
