[TUHS] FORTRAN

[imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)]

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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 3/20/18, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> > Having worked on system programming for UNIX and a few of the PDP-11 DEC
> > OS’s (DOS, RT, RSX, and in passing RSTS), I can tell you Fortran was
> > abhorrent.
> >
> Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
> programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.
> Screwdrivers always make bad hammers.
>

With care, and the right additional pseudo-primitives, you can do quite
interesting systems-programming-like things in Fortran. But they are
usually a variation on RATFOR and often involve more pain than would
otherwise have been needed, but it's possible. I once did some low-level
systems stuff in FORTRAN-66 that lived under a psuedo Fortran 77
pre-processor that had some CPP-like macro features....

And I will never, ever, do it again :). I might do Turbo-PASCAL again, but
no system's programming in Fortran.

Warner
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