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quality of code (Fortran IV) some e-mail exchanged between me and William Waite, until recently, Professor at Colorado.
On (More) some e-mail exchanged between me and William Waite, until recently, Professor at Colorado.
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 10:18:49PM +1000, Mullins wrote:
It's nearly 2 years since I wrote, and have not yet replied to your
question about what prompted me to write.
I noticed that you retired last year, so I wasn't thinking it was very
likely that this e-mail would reach you.
My reason for writing now is to ask do you know anyone who is able to
assess the quality of Fortran IV code?
WAITE: "Quality" is, of course, in the eye of the beholder!
me: Ideally, it would be possible to have some advanced tool which could
do this (just as people want to use theorem provers to prove code correct).
WAITE: Grumble... I think that quality judgements tend to be much more heuristic, and therefore outside the realm of even an advanced tool. We can certainly verify that a program adheres to some set of coding standards, but that doesn't necessarily equate to quality.
me: However, it would not be necessary to have an automated method to
assess the quality of code. It would be possible to manually make
assertions about what the code was intended to do, and to check these
manually, either by running the code, or perhaps by checking it by eye.
WAITE: This sounds more like correctness than quality to me.
me: Besides yourself, Dijkstra and Brinch Hansen were names that
immediately came to my mind in 1976 (as people who might have been
experts in Fortran IV), but they are now deceased. Also, I am not sure
if Brinch Hansen knows anything about Fortran. I am not even sure if
Dijkstra knew much about Fortran, because he may have left it for Algol, long before Fortran IV.
WAITE: Dijkstra considered Fortran to be an "infantile disorder" and PL/1 a "fatal disease". I doubt very much that he would have made any other judgements about the quality of specific programs.
Jeanne Adams would be one of the people I would have recommended, but unfortunately she is also now deceased. Walter S. Brainerd is a possibility -- I haven't found an obituary for him!
But actually, Fortran is alive and well in many places. Our local scientific computing shop, NCAR, uses it heavily.
me:
Yours truly
Richard Mullins
-----Original Message-----
From: William Waite [mailto:William.Waite@Colorado.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, 19 October 2005 2:31 AM
To: Mullins
Subject: Re: STAGE2
On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:20:21PM +1000, Mullins wrote:
Dear Dr Waite.
Regrettably I missed your talk "Gurus and the Gullible" which was
held at CSIRO in Canberra in mid 1977. I was at work and did not
take off the time to attend. Installed your stage2 software in the
1970's and 1980's. In recent years I downloaded code from Dr
Clarence Lehman of University of Minnesota, who installed STAGE2 in
C. Your contribution is greatly appreciated.
WAITE: It's always nice to hear from satisfied users! But may I ask what
prompted this particular message? (Less)
HISTORY 001 Hundreds of new computer languages are invented each year. By 1966 there were already 700 languages. (More) Hundreds of new computer languages are invented each year. By 1966 there were already 700 languages.
Ought we to have standardised on a language, instead of inventing new ones?
Cobol was invented around 1960. It ran on NCR 315 with 32K of memory at NCR in Sydney. (I worked there as a computer operator from late 1967).
Cobol could certainly be used as a "general purpose programming language", in the sense that any computer programming language is "Turing complete" (or can be extended to be so) and hence is able to be used for general computations.
One could treat Cobol as a base, and write processors in Cobol for other languages - even interpreting a command line may mean implementation of a processor, perhaps for a simple computer language of our design.
Fortran IV has been used as a language processor. William Waite wrote general code in Fortran IV, called STAGE2.
STAGE2 was used to build processors for many languages, e.g. it is said to have been used on the first non-Xerox version of Smalltalk. STAGE2 could easily be implemented in Cobol (although I do not know if this has been done) so this would be a practical way of developing language processors based on Cobol.
Maginnis wrote a compiler generator in Fortran IV. Due to scarcity of tools for the Apple II at Dept of Health in the 1980's, I rewrote this in Basic and used it. (In hindsight, I think it is possible that the area I was working in was given non-IBM equipment to work with, e.g. Apple II with no software, on the tacit understanding that nothing useful would be developed. Perhaps a more civilised version of a Siberian labour camp). (Less)
PGI Visual Fortran 2008 v9 0 4 WIN64-Lz0
2009-10-29 - extension: rar - size: 177 MB
PGI Visual Fortran 2008 v9 0 4 WIN64-Lz0
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