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From: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Some elaboration on search for teaching structured FORTRAN on UNIX
Message-ID: <3751@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Thu, 28-May-87 00:10:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: jade.3751
Posted: Thu May 28 00:10:24 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 29-May-87 05:24:32 EDT
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu(Edouard Lagache)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 27
Keywords: Structured FORTRAN, FORTRAN-77, Teaching Philosophy.


    There has been two sorts of replies to my posting about teaching
    structured FORTRAN on UNIX.  The first is to try a structured
    preprocessor.  Unfortunately that idea failed to pass muster with
    the staff.  The main reason being that it is very hard to associate
    error messages which are referenced to the generated FORTRAN code
    with the program the student actually wrote.  Since this is an
    introductory course, we felt it was asking too much of the students.

    The other sort of reply was that courses of FORTRAN should teach
    the present standard (FORTRAN-77).  For historical reasons we have
    always taught with watfiv dialects (primarily because WATSOFT compilers
    are very good at catching errors).  However, there is a philosophical
    case to be made as well.  With FORTRAN 8.X due in at most 2 1/2 years,
    there isn't a very strong case to teach a nearly defunct standard.
    Also providing actual structured flow of control provides an
    important enforcement to good programming habits, and is much easier to
    debug.

         We are not very dogmatic about keeping structured FORTRAN, but
    there is a general concensus that getting a structured FORTRAN would
    make everybody's life easier.

                                                 Edouard Lagache
                                                 School of Education
                                                 U.C. Berkeley
                                                 lagache@violet.berkeley.edu