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From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: File handling in Fortran 77
Message-ID: <1990Sep4.220004.22922@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 4 Sep 90 22:00:04 GMT
References: <26e23059@ThreeL.co.uk>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 45

In article <26e23059@ThreeL.co.uk> jf@threel.co.uk (John Fisher) writes:
>In article <1990Aug30.132335.20164@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu
>(Doug McDonald) writes:
> 
>> I meant that a computer that can't run C is a joke.
>
>I get really worried about remarks like this.   People just come popping
>along, ignorant of the whole history of computing and of everything outside
>their C/UNIX ghetto; 

Sorry, bub, I'm not a member of that getto. I'm a member of, in rough
chronological order, the gettos of the IBM 1620 and 704, the
IBM 7094, the IBM 360, the Sigma (later Xerox) 5, the PDP8,
the PDP11 (RT11), the PDP 10, the CDC Cyber 175, the Illiac IV,
the VAX/VMS, the IBM-PC, and then at the tail end, Unix.   

>ignorant too, of developments like functional languages
>and of the whole realm of what computers are actually *used*for*, and make
>remarks like this, and everybody laughs and says how very iconoclastic and
>progressive it is.
>
I am aware of what computers are used for. I actually USE them!!!
I'm even aware of how COBOL uses records. I just contend that 
the records belong in the COBOL, not in the OS itself.  

>The trouble is, it's evidence of a closed, rigid and dogmatic frame of
>mind.   And in twenty or thirty years, when these folk are in charge of
>the whole computer industry, anybody who comes along with a new idea is
>going to have a hard time of it.
I doubt it, if they have a better idea. The rigidified record-oriented
mindset ruled for a long while (outside if the mini-computer real-time
world) and then it now seems that it is being superceded.

>
>No, a computer that can't run C is not necessarily a joke, 
I contend that it is. Remember that X3J11 bent over backwards to
accomodate things like special Lisp computers.


I was always befuddled by the concept of "records". Even on the 
7094 I found them odd. And on the 360, both odd and supremely irritating.
I honestly think 360-style JCL was the stupidist idea I have ever seen
on a computer. VMS was a big improvement over that, and Unix over VMS.

Doug McDonald