On Mon, Sep 15 2014, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 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
Perhaps instead of
Do 15 i=1,10
a loop from 1 to 10
we had
Do 15 i=1.10
which is the same in fortran as
do15i = 1.0
an assignment statement.
allan
