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From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
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Subject: Re: [TUHS] History of m6?
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On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 04:30:15PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Nov 2019, SPC wrote:
> 
> >My first FORTRAN textbook was titled "FORTRAN with WATFOR and WATFIV". It
> >had a long print run as well.
> 
> Now *that* brings back memories (not necessarily pleasant).  WATFOR was as
> ugly as sin

I'm pretty sure that was the Fortran I learned.  Yeah, it was not C.  But
it was math.  I spent a bunch of time learning accumulated errors and 
more time on floating point numbers.  My dad was a theoretical physics
guy so I did some coding for him.  I respected Fortran for what it could
do but I developed a hate for floating point.  In my mind, floating
point numbers meant you couldn't handle the world you were working in.
It just felt like you could shift the domain you were working in so
integers could work.  If you couldn't do that, you were admitting that
you were not accurate.