I certainly am not arguing against developing new languages with improved programming techniques, but I think you're being too quick to consider liking an older technique as heresy. I programmed in Fortran for over 4 decades and never had any trouble with the variable name typing system:
1. Once you're used to it, it becomes second nature and doesn't slow down program development at all. If anything, it speeds it up a bit. 2. If you really hate it, you can turn it off - either selectively or completely (implicit none). 3. It doesn't restrict program structure or development in any way. 4. It doesn't interact with program execution speed in any way. This last point, I think, is very important. I'm a Julia newbe so I'm just reading all the stuff about the interaction between variable typing and execution speed. I've gotta tell you, having a language where I don't worry about this at all and then the compiler handles any optimization issues has a lot to say for it. Why is this "craziness?" Larry On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Art Kuo <[email protected]> wrote: > > Having the type of a variable be determined by the variable name is >> craziness. Which is why you always run with implicit none. >> > > It had its reason back in its day. For math it is/was typical to choose > counter-like integers for things like a series, with variables like i, j, > k, l, m, or n. It wasn't unreasonable to carry that convention into Fortran > 66. Back in the days of punch cards and 1024-byte memory, variable names > were often one letter and one alphanumeric, so the easier/shorter the > declaration, the better. In Fortran 77, "implicit" was introduced as a way > to maintain backwards compatibility and also optionally break from the i-n > convention and be clear about it. Nowadays we can be thankful for upper and > lower case, and the backspace key makes long variable names trivial. >
