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From: ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Keywords: FORTRAN, stupidity
Message-ID: <11029@chaph.usc.edu>
Date: 25 Jul 90 18:09:58 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu>
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In article <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu> moshkovi@cn.ecn.purdue.edu writes:
>Please, don't consider my question offending, but why the hell in this world
>you people still using FORTRAN

Honestly, I can't imagine why Fortran is half as popular as it
is.  All old libraries can be linked into Pascal/C programs these
days, which removes the only "fundamental" reason to hang on with
fortran.

I recently hit a research group which worked exclusively in
fortran, and had to write fortran for a while, and was it a
nightmare!!  A language which has no data structures to speak of,
no dynamic allocation, no recursion, everything passed by
reference, no checking for number/type of arguments to
functons/subroutines, no control over scoping..not to mention the
silly syntactic irritations.

God, it's just like COBOL; a dead language which clings to life
on the rigidity of it's fossilised users.  Only, in the case of 
COBOL you could ignore the disease since it was just business 
majors involved!
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)747-9991, ajayshah@usc.edu
                              The more things change, the more they stay insane.
_______________________________________________________________________________