Rich Shepard wrote: > On Sat, 10 Oct 2009, Roderick A. Anderson wrote: > >> Many years ago I was asked to add some minor functionality to a >> Fortran program written by a Civil Engineer. There was no >> documentation and the variables were exactly like this. F1-F18. >> That made it interesting as they were used to to do some complex >> calculations and I, not being a civil engineer, didn't know what >> was being used for where. > > Even if you were the CE who wrote the code, in 6 months you wouldn't > understand it, either. There's still a lot of FORTRAN code written > by scientists (and engineers) in the 1970s with no documentation. >
A friend that worked at the same place and was a CE told me the problem with letting engineers take programming classes is they then think they can program. :-) \\||/ Rod -- > Punching comments cards on the 029 keypunch took time and money (for > the cards, for the reading/processing/output of the cards) so most of > us didn't do it. We did draw diagonal lines with felt-tip pens on the > top of the decks so when we, or the operators behind the wall, > dropped the deck we could put it back in order within our lifetime. > With a limit of 80 chars per Hollerith card (and statement length) > strange variable names were the norm. I've got lots of horror stories > of FORTRAN code I wrote, and libraries I used, in the '70s writing > ecosystem, population, and mathematical models for the S/360 > mainframes. > > Rich > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
