begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 04:28:11PM -0800: > Darren New wrote: > >Also lacking pointers: FORTRAN, COBOL, APL. :-) Seeing a pattern here? > > Actually, FORTRAN kinda does have pointers. > > You can dereference a COMMON block by redeclaring things to be in a > different order or type.
COMMON and EQUIVALENCE blocks let you do all sorts of strange things. I roomed above a guy who wrote self-modifying recursive FORTRAN programs for fun. (He also bread-boarded PC peripherals to his Atari 400, for fun.) > One of the annoying mistakes used to be to have two different > incompatible COMMON blocks that the system will happily let pass and > cause you all manner of nightmares. It's been a LONG time since I've used any of that, I hardly remember anything but the WTF moment from discovering an off-by-one-column error helping someone else debug their FORTRAN code. That must have been a pretty bad nightmare to result in such a scar... does it make for a good story? -- Every scar is a memory, every memory a story, But not all scars are for memories of glory. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
