On 15/09/2014 11:00, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Monday 15 September 2014 07:21:18 Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> I believe Fortran is still very much alive and well in engineering and >> physics - 40 years of number crunching code doesn't just go away by itself > > Confirmed. (Remember Blake's Seven?) It's the main application language in a > multimillion-pound grid control system I was involved with 20 years ago. > Fortran 66, that is, not 90. Nine other languages were used too - even > including Pascal or something like it. Just the mainframes cost millions. >
My favourite Fortran story: One of the Mariner spacecraft yonks ago was sent a routine regular course correction. It flew off at some wild angle and was never seen again, and because the antenna was pointing in the wrong direction comms could not be re-established. Oops. Expensive spacecraft down the drain.... The bug was eventually trace to a comma instead of a period in some Fortran code (made a huge difference). Note that many code reviews missed the bug, and the compiler accepted it as valid syntax >> I could go on, but you get the idea :-) > > What, you? :-) > -- Alan McKinnon [email protected]
