Who's into FORTRAN?

[Chris2005]

and if you aren't, why the h not?

[Terry Yager]

Ummn, I think I read a book about it once...

--T

[mbbrutman]

Ah, another enigmatic post.

Unless you are doing serious math and using the existing FORTRAN libraries, why on Earth would anybody want to pick up FORTRAN for pleasure? Only supercomputer types and engineering types use it. You'd best not try to write an operating system in it.

That being said, here is the obligatory FORTRAN joke.

"GOD is real unless declared integer"

If you don't get the joke, I'll explain it in a few days ....

[CP/M User]

> and if you aren't, why the h not?

The principals of FORTRAN are great - however from a CP/M
perspective, I haven't enjoyed using Digital Research's
version of FORTRAN one little bit - possibly due the
compilation of the programs, for a two pass compiler, I've
never seen such a large program from small amount of code
(even when optimised I think the program was like 77kb).

In DOS Simtel had an interesting FORTRAN compiler - which was
"FREE", compared to DR it was much better - it's quite old
too, so if anyone wanted to program FORTRAN (this was based
around FORTRAN 77 - which is good) in DOS, that'd be the
program to get. I don't really program for it though.

The language itself, I believe you can do some fun stuff with
it, most notibly visural text effects I've got one somewhere
from a program which does a few calculations in order to
produce the effect. Becuase maths can play a powerful role,
anyone who could get some Imagery happening can do some neat
tricks with FORTRAN. Obviously though, the language has been
designed for the more mathimatical/scientific perspective
though, have never been sure to know if other languages (such
as Assembly) could be incorporated into it - perhaps in
FORTRAN 90 they did this - though I'm unsure (you'd think some
graphics could come in very handy).

FORTRAN has a lot of history to it - initally came out in 1954
for reasons described above & like another early language (in
COBOL designed in 1959/60 for business applications /
accounting, etc) both of these languages (as with other
languages developed at the time) used Punch cards for programs
to be written. This trend came out in later editions of the
language, so unless you knew where the source code was placed
approrately, you could have tons of errors.
The DOS program I mentioned earlier is like this - however, a
switch within the program allows you to switch it off &
programs can be written however they want to be.

Strickly speaking - you maybe able to get a game out of
FORTRAN, though alternative languages like Pascal, C, Assembly
& BASIC are certainally decent alternatives of handling these
kinds of programs.

CP/M User.

[atari2600a]

Question: Didn't Bill Gates do a mainframe (or maybe it was a minicomputer) OS in FORTRAN? I know he did something in FORTRAN when he was young...

[alexkerhead]

Why doesn't one use fortran?
Because it is really freaking complicated.
I did a project with it in my programming II+ class, we had to write a game with wording, kind of like the old rpg games, but it took far more code and time than it would have in cobalt, or even java.
It really showed us how efficient languages have gotten.
Atari, an OS can be qualified as an OS with little or no real function.
I could write an app that loads on boot and you can view the HD structure, that would quilify as an OS, but not a good one. He may have screwed around with fortran, but him abandoning it quickly is a sign it isn't worth playing with.
Like Mr. Brutman said, it is a mathmatically based language, requiring classes in finite math(which I am taking..lol) and you'll need to be more familiar with your basic machine coding.

[Vlad]

Whats wrong with Visual Basic?

-VK

[alexkerhead]

Whats wrong with Visual Basic?

-VK
Nothing. ^_^
I just don't use it(much).

[bbcmicro]

To be fair, FORTRAN is 50 years old. It must have some merit to stay. Although I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

[Vlad]

There's a Fortran compiler on the Cray I use, but I don't dare mess with it. I hate math and it hates me. I'm going to leave Fortran alone....

-VK

[Erik]

I did a little work in Fortran a while back. It depends on what your goal is, but it is an older language missing many of the capabilities today's programmers take for granted.

Then again, I've worked in COBOL, BASIC (early versions of tiny BASIC and MS stuff) MUMPS (there's a nightmare for you - a programming language designed by a doctor - ugh) and a variety of visual programming environments. Sometimes the early procedural stuff is actually easier.

[carlsson]

A friend of mine did dry-runs of the expected outcome in this week's fantasy football in Fortran, because that was the programming language he knew best (he could get his way around C too, but not as elegantly).

I believe the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) contains frontend for Fortran 90. Not sure about Fortran 77 though. Personally I've never touched these languages, as they were obsoleted (or only used in specific places) by the early 1990's.

I went to a computer consultant, and they had got a request from a customer who was using some broken monster system in RPG (the programming language, not role-playing games). The consultant made these conclusions:

1. We don't have the experience in RPG to fix the system.
2. It is not worth the money to lend in someone else to do it.
3. It will take an awful lot of time to write a new system from scratch in another programming language.
4. The customer will get hiccups when we tell him the cost of 3.

So in the end, they politely declined the customer. Perhaps they found another consultant who has been sitting with underemployed RPG experts since the 70'ties.

[bbcmicro]

Loosely on topic, does anybody do anything with FORTH? now that is an odd lingo. A nice chap gave me a ROM for my BBC Micro and I can't make head nor tail of it.

[Erik]

Loosely on topic, does anybody do anything with FORTH? now that is an odd lingo. A nice chap gave me a ROM for my BBC Micro and I can't make head nor tail of it.

I've got FORTH for the C64 and, I think, Apple ][ as well as some other platforms. I've never tried it, though. There is a FIG (FORTH Interest Group) around that had a booth at the VCF a year or two back.

[carlsson]

I have Forth for VIC-20 etc. I have really tried to get my head into it, briefly read the book by Leo Brodie and made some simple building blocks, but never got to do anything more advanced. Too bad, because it may be a good intermediate language between Basic and pure machine code, if it wasn't for the custom Forth interpreter required.

[Chris2005]

"Unless you are doing serious math and using the existing FORTRAN libraries, why on Earth would anybody want to pick up FORTRAN for pleasure?"

Well...it's vintage. Let's not forget what forum we're on. What would be more groovy then some game or whatever written in it? It's been quite some time, but it (at least the basics of it) were pretty easy to learn.
And as to the libraries - imagine decades of stuph written that you can tack on to your program. That in itself has got to be interesting.

"I've never seen such a large program from small amount of code"

That's unusual. I was of the persuasion it was capable of particularly speedy executables.

"have never been sure to know if other languages (such as Assembly) could be incorporated into it"

Modern versions could certainly have inline assembly code. Not sure about IBM Pro FORTRAN 1.0, F77 compliant, unlike MicroTrash's early versions. This was written by Ryan-McFarland. Already had the images, but obtained original disks and docs. O man what a haul.
Grace Hopper wrote COBOL, right? Figures a dame would write such a verbose language LOL. Did she write FORTRAN too. Or do I got it all backwards?

"Like Mr. Brutman said, it is a mathmatically based language, requiring classes in finite math(which I am taking..lol) and you'll need to be more familiar with your basic machine coding."

Neither the math nor the knowledge of the machine innards bothers me personally. I'll be playing around with it in the next few weeks probably. Next question, who's into C LOL LOL. I think I have (had?) Quick C around someplace. Haven't seen it around lately though :(

[Erik]

I've got some very old C compilers for CP/M systems on 8" disks.

BTW, if I remember correctly the original Adventure (Collosal Cave - XYZZY, Plover, etc.) was written in Fortran.

I was picking through some old docs this weekend and found a sheet with someones notes on it. His scrap paper was an old listing of the data file for Adventure containing the text spit back at users. It wasn't complete, but it was funny to see again.

Back in the early 1980s I had a complete listing, code and data, on greenbar from an IBM line printer. I wish I hadn't trashed that. :(

[Terry Yager]

Grace Hopper invented FORTRAN? Kewl, I didn't know that.

--T

[Erik]

Grace Hopper invented FORTRAN? Kewl, I didn't know that.

Fortran (properly FORTRAN) was invented by Griffith John Backus. Grace Hopper gave us COBOL.

[Terry Yager]

Fortran (properly FORTRAN) was invented by Griffith John Backus. Grace Hopper gave us COBOL.

Oh, that's kewl too.

--T

[Chris2005]

"I believe the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) contains frontend for Fortran 90. Not sure about Fortran 77 though. Personally I've never touched these languages, as they were obsoleted (or only used in specific places) by the early 1990's."

Yes gcc can decode FORTRAN-77 IIRC. Not -90 though.

My Canon Cat has some sort of built in FORTH interpreter or something. I have the rom images (anybody ever burn an eprom from an image?) for the Radio Electronics Robot Brain, a.k.a Vesta Technologies oem-188 SBC. One of them is FORTH, the other is supposedly the BASIC and BIOS combined. I took a peek at it recently with (with Notepad) and it could be the case, but the picture on the cover of the magazine show 3 eproms. They haven't been talking to me lately...

Erik, are you setup for making images of 8" disks? You should archive those bad boys. Or hand them off to someone who can. I'm partially to the point where I can connect an 8" drive to a Pentium system as illustrated by Dave Dunfield. Gonna take me a bit longer though...

[Terry Yager]

Chris,

If you can send me the images, I'll have a go at it (I've been 'practicing' a little lately). Are they straight images, or have they been converted to hex format?

--T

[Jorg]

Long time ago during a traineeshipperiod from my study, I worked for a company where I arrived when the manager I had to work for was on holiday for the first 4 weeks.
All I had was a VAXstation, a short note to get me started, an IBM AT and a floppy of Larry in the land of the Lounge Lizards..

After three weeks of Larry I found a Fortran'77 book in the closet.

So I had one week of teaching myself Fortran, on a VAX.

But then, I am an Engineer..

[CP/M User]

bbcmicro wrote:

> Loosely on topic, does anybody do anything with
> FORTH? now that is an odd lingo. A nice chap gave me
> a ROM for my BBC Micro and I can't make head nor tail
> of it.

If your a Jupiter ACE enthusiest writing programs - then sure
you'd be writing programs in Forth quite possibly.

Fortunately, I have the website (http://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/) on hand :-)

It's had lots of updates, hardware projects & yes some new (http://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/index_program_listings.html)
programs in the programming section.

Lots of software for the Jupiter Ace has also been uncovered
since I was there last (from the good ol' days of 1983/4).

If people want to program Forth - this would be a great way to
contribute cause I believe lots of the documentation (Manual)
is there - plus some Assembly stuff if you so desire.

Forth maybe considered a bit more complicated than BASIC (if
you exclude the GOTO command), though unlike BASIC some
powerful routines can be made in Forth - the rewards can be
quite great.

Personally, I'd loved to be involved, though most of my time
is taken through Studies & working out in the field - which
restricts me playing around with it - but I've been so happy
with what Stephen Parry-Thomas has done for this machine.

To answer your question even further though, Usenet groups on
Forth still seem to be yacking away - last I saw, the language
maybe 30 years ol' now, though overtime it's been developing &
advancing - haven't seen anything recent though, still would
kick Java or Javascripts butt anyday! ;-)

CP/M User.

[CP/M User]

Erik wroet:

> Fortran (properly FORTRAN) was invented by Griffith
> John Backus. Grace Hopper gave us COBOL.

Grace also gave us the first Computer Bug! :-D

She also played a role with the early electronic computer -
Harvard Mark I.

That's about all I recall, except I believe she was a lovely
highly intellegant lady that loved her machines! :-D

CP/M User.

[CP/M User]

vlad wrote:

> Whats wrong with Visual Basic?

It can't do this! :-(

10 PRINT"Welcome To Visual BASIC - another Billion for Bill Gates."
20 GOTO 10

What a rip-off! :-D

CP/M User.

[CP/M User]

I should point out that FORTRAN and Forth are two highly
different languages. Only by name do they share a simularaty -
that's all.

Any other language people want to know about?

BASIC
ALGOL xx
LISP
er? ICON
MODULA

There's heaps out there. Just remember we're a vintage
computer forum! :-D

CP/M User.

[Terry Yager]

LISP & PROLOG (can anyone say 'Pilot?) are prob'ly closest to FORTH, but LOGO is also an extensible (4GL) language. Oh yeah, ya forgot to mention ADA too.

--T

[Chris2005]

"> Whats wrong with Visual Basic?

It can't do this! :-(

Code:
10 PRINT"Welcome To Visual BASIC - another Billion for Bill Gates."
20 GOTO 10
What a rip-off! :-D"

VB, although a moderately useful tool I guess, is a perfect example of MicroShaft's policy of embrace, extend, extinguish. BASIC should have remained BASIC. Some of the syntax has become goofy as all get out.
It's funny too how many people think that there is no life outside of Microshaft products. To some there IS not other language but Visual Basic. I mean get a life.

[carlsson]

Yeah, Lisp is like Forth turned upside down. Logo is a Children's Lisp (and yes, children tend to lisp). Prolog is a completely different type of animal, and while it is considered advanced just like Lisp and many of the other languages mentioned, they really don't bear any relationship AFAIK.

Isn't Ada a procedural/sequential language much like C and Pascal, but strongly typed and with bits of OO added? I have only read about it and know it was developed by or for (?) the US army, and is considered extremely rigid to use. In the old joke about how to shoot yourself in the foot with a programming language, you couldn't get by the safety trigger on the gun in Ada.

If I understand correctly, there were several languages calling themselves Pilot, not having anything in common. I have one implementation on the C64 which I was able to make a Hello World program in, but not much more.

These days, if a programming language doesn't have a good compiler, I tend to not bother. Not because compilers per se are cool, but because if the language is interpreted, it means anyone who wants to run my program needs to have the interpreter installed. It may both be cumbersome and costly. The old (vintage) systems already have their limited set of built-in software, and the newer systems don't have any built-in programming language at all.

[Terry Yager]

Yeah, PROLOG is a thing all to itself. I only mention it because of it's direct relationship to it's ancestor, LISP. Both are still used extensively in AI applications. My friend, Paul, who I've known since he waz 9 yrz old, and who considerz me his 'mentor', (ghawd knowz why), won a programming contest at MichiganTech, against a couple hundred other CS students. His program produced the tightest code, since he waz the only one using PROLOG (IIRC, his program compiled into 3 M/L instructions). I'd given him my copy of Turbo PROLOG a few yearz earlier, and he taught himself. (It's still his language-of-choice to this day, although he's fluent in several otherz.).

As for ADA, all I remember is all the hype, when it waz s'pozed to be 'TheNextBigThing' but for some reason, never took root.

--T

[Terry Yager]

Pilot itself, is not much of a programming language per se. It is more of an 'environment', allowing several flavors of code to be implemented. Pilot was intended to be an 'educational' language, just as FORTRAN is aimed at the scientific, and COBOL is designed for buisness markets.

ADA was named as the 'official' language of the US Gov't, so any program for the gov't *must* be done in ADA (someone musta thought this was AGoodThing).

--T

[CP/M User]

The Pilot I know consists of just 5 commands (one word on the
most part) - for some reason you could write stuff with it
though.

CP/M User.

[CP/M User]

Think I've been down this path before, however Forth has some
connection with Postscript - based on the language tree I got.

Forth was Developed virtually from stratch - obviously any
simularaties it might have got from earlier languages were
bits of code the developer liked & incorporated them into
Forth.

CP/M User.

[CP/M User]

Chris2005 wrote:

> VB, although a moderately useful tool I guess, is a
> perfect example of MicroShaft's policy of embrace,
> extend, extinguish. BASIC should have remained BASIC.
> Some of the syntax has become goofy as all get out.

> It's funny too how many people think that there is no
> life outside of Microshaft products. To some there IS
> not other language but Visual Basic. I mean get a
> life.

Delphi kicks anyday & it ain't Microsoft. Sure it's just
Visual Pascal - though Pascal's got some advantages over
BASIC! :-D

CP/M User.

[Chris2005]

"Delphi kicks anyday & it ain't Microsoft. Sure it's just
Visual Pascal - though Pascal's got some advantages over
BASIC! :-D"

To say the least. Weird tokens in Pascal though. And to quote someone (?) you could write Visual Basic with Delphi, but not the other way around.

[DoctorPepper]

I took a Navy course on Fortran once. A loonnngggg time ago. As I remember, I didn't like it much back then. I didn't much like Cobol either.

My favorite computer languages are (in this order):

C
Python
Java
Perl
C++
Pascal (and Delphi)
Basic (and Visual Basic)

I prefer to work in C, Python and Java, but will work in any and all of them. I pretty much gave up on Assembler many years ago, and remember very little of it.

You could argue that Python and Perl are just scripting languages, and you'd be correct, but I would counter that unless speed of execution was imperative, you can get more accomplished faster using one of them than you can using any of the compiled languages. For the vast majority of my programming needs, Python does the job admirably.

[carlsson]

The strong indention in Python has always put me off. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy indention, but it should be on my selection, not according to strict rules of the programming language.

[DoctorPepper]

The strong indention in Python has always put me off. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy indention, but it should be on my selection, not according to strict rules of the programming language.

As it did me too, at first. I had been coding in C, Java and Perl for the most part, up until I took my latest contract with IBM last May. The folks I work with use Python quite heavily, so I bought the O'Reily "Learning Python" book and started reading. Somewhere around half-way through, I decided the "forced" indentation really didn't bother me as much as I had originally thought. What had truly been bothering me was the lack of C-style syntax. I had been coding in C-like languages for almost two decades, and all of a sudden, I wasn't any more.

The thing I've grown to really like about Python is the readability of the code. If you write some C or Perl code, then come back a year or so later, you can have quite a bit of trouble reading it without some serious comments. With Python, the code is still very readable, almost self-documenting. I can glance down a Python source code module and tell exactly what's happening, even with someone else's code. Try doing that in Perl ;-)

Give Python the thirty day test. Use it for your normal tasks (anything you'd normally use Perl for), and see if it doesn't grow on you. If you don't believe me, try reading Eric S. Raymond's "Why Python?" article in the Linux Journal:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

Howard

[Unknown_K]

The only time I used Fortranl was during college in 1990. We had to do some simultaneous reaction calculation on a mainframe using Fortran (think they gave us 3-5 Seconds of CPU time to get the project done).

[carlsson]

I don't use Perl neither. Currently I'm on a diet of PHP and ASP (eeek), perhaps with a sprinkling of C, 6502 assembler or Microsoft Basic.

[CP/M User]

carlsson wrote:

> I don't use Perl neither. Currently I'm on a diet of
> PHP and ASP (eeek),

Oops, guess it's my fault for diving into the more modern stuff! :-(

> perhaps with a sprinkling of C, 6502 assembler or
> Microsoft Basic.

Ah that's better! C is still reasonibly scarey language - if
only we did fun apps programming at school in SmallC!

CP/M User.

[DoctorPepper]

I got into Perl out of necessity, back in 1998. We were doing some web development for the government, and they had chosen "Tango" (blech!) as their development language. I guess it was fine for simple things, but it was woefully under-powered for anything even moderately challenging. My fellow programmer and I started using Perl for that, and it worked great. I became hooked, and started using it for any purpose I could. I've done a boat-load of Perl programming since 1998.

I have used PHP for some web development as of late, and it is very close to Perl in its syntax. At least until you start throwing in OOP. I've never had the desire to use ASP though.

As for C, man I love its simplicity. C has very few keywords, unlike other, more bloated, languages. It does take a bit to get the hang of "rolling your own" for everything you do, but I think it makes you a much better programmer. How many of us C programmers have had to create their own linked list or hash table implementation? Now go to your average Java programmer and ask them to create their own linked list or hash table (not using the ones thoughtfully provided by Sun) and see how much head scratching goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I like languages with lots of built-ins and garbage collection and other wonderful things, but I also believe if that's all you have ever learned, you're a poorer programmer for it.

carlsson wrote:

> I don't use Perl neither. Currently I'm on a diet of
> PHP and ASP (eeek),

Oops, guess it's my fault for diving into the more modern stuff! :-(

> perhaps with a sprinkling of C, 6502 assembler or
> Microsoft Basic.

Ah that's better! C is still reasonibly scarey language - if
only we did fun apps programming at school in SmallC!

CP/M User.

[carlsson]

I have considered if I would be able to implement e.g. a linked list or a more complex structure in 6502 machine code. I think I could, but yet I haven't had a reason to do it. I did implement QuickSort in machine code a few years ago though, purely as an exercise.

[dreddnott]

My mom was really into FORTRAN and BASIC. She programmed on one of those ancient HP 9830A Desktop Calculators...and even figured out how to make the plotter draw seagulls and clouds all by herself. She also wrote in ASM for *ancient* TI calculators.

I don't remember the system she programmed FORTRAN on...

[CP/M User]

DoctorPepper wrote:

> Don't get me wrong, I like languages with lots of
> built-ins and garbage collection and other wonderful
> things, but I also believe if that's all you have
> ever learned, you're a poorer programmer for it.

Fortunately TP isn't like that & rountines can be added -
obviously though TP offers a quite a few more routines (bit
like BASIC), though offers just a little bit more C based
stuff as well! :-D

At least my website (http://www.geocities.com/cpm22_user/programs/Amstrad_CPC/TurboPAS/index.txt) offers some routines which demonstrate
some of the smaller things which aren't usually demonstrated
in Turbo Pascal 3! :-D

[DoctorPepper]

Man, you truly are a glutton for punishment! Just kidding. I don't know if I'd go that far, to implement complex data structures in assembler (any assembler) at my feeble, elderly age. Perhaps if I were 20 years younger. Make that 25 years younger ;-)

Nope, I think C is as "low-level" as I want to get from now on. My days of assembler (8086 assembler) are long gone and mostly forgotten.

I have considered if I would be able to implement e.g. a linked list or a more complex structure in 6502 machine code. I think I could, but yet I haven't had a reason to do it. I did implement QuickSort in machine code a few years ago though, purely as an exercise.

[DoctorPepper]

Ah, the joys of Turbo Pascal. I really miss it. Pascal is/was a nice, clean language, easy to build on. I moved from TP to Delphi, and worked in that for quite a while. With the impending demise of Borland's developer tools division, I'm afraid it is probably the curtain call for commercial Delphi and Pascal.

Thank goodness for Free Pascal! At least Pascal won't die out completely.

Makes you wonder though, where would Pascal be now if Microsoft's implementation of Pascal had taken off?


DoctorPepper wrote:

> Don't get me wrong, I like languages with lots of
> built-ins and garbage collection and other wonderful
> things, but I also believe if that's all you have
> ever learned, you're a poorer programmer for it.

Fortunately TP isn't like that & rountines can be added -
obviously though TP offers a quite a few more routines (bit
like BASIC), though offers just a little bit more C based
stuff as well! :-D

At least my website (http://www.geocities.com/cpm22_user/programs/Amstrad_CPC/TurboPAS/index.txt) offers some routines which demonstrate
some of the smaller things which aren't usually demonstrated
in Turbo Pascal 3! :-D

[CP/M User]

DoctorPepper wrote:

> Ah, the joys of Turbo Pascal. I really miss it.
> Pascal is/was a nice, clean language, easy to build
> on. I moved from TP to Delphi, and worked in that for
> quite a while. With the impending demise of Borland's
> developer tools division, I'm afraid it is probably
> the curtain call for commercial Delphi and Pascal.

Ah the memories. Back in the days when I knew just a little
bit of Pascal (I learnt some on an Apple Mac) I had to
translate some Pascal programs into Delphi. Fortunately, I had
a teacher at my disposal & managed to easily play around with
Delphi - twas a bit scarey at first. I managed to excel with
it though - wrote this kick butt calculator - which I later
enhanced to make it load Bitmap images in the background! :-D

> Thank goodness for Free Pascal! At least Pascal won't
> die out completely.

Yeah well if it wasn't for Free Pascal it might of been a sad
death for Pascal - Delphi I guess is there, though only half
of it's really Pascal.

> Makes you wonder though, where would Pascal be now if
> Microsoft's implementation of Pascal had taken off?

Fortunately it didn't - Borland were on with a Winner in a way
- it makes me wonder how far CP/M would have got if Borland
made later versions for CP/M! :-D

CP/M User.

[carlsson]

Actually, Quicksort of an array with 8-bit numbers was not too hard in 6502 machine code. I even got a response from someone else who had implemented in a completely different way (and perhaps a few cycles more efficient). The same guy had went ahead to implement Shellsort, Mergesort and one more while he was into it.

It all started with some teenager troll/wannabee who had frequented newsgroups for years, posting essays of garbage, pretending to have a lot of interior knowledge and contacts. A few years ago, someone asked for programmers to take on an impossible task, and even collected a fair sum of money (a few hundred $$$) to anyone who could complete the task, which still was impossible to implement given the hardware restrictions. Like money can stretch hardware limitations.

Anyway, this wannabee decided to take on the task, borrowed some development equipment and nothing happened for a long time. Then he comes back, posts random fragments of code he has picked up from various webpages. Yes, it was verified, but he claimed it was his own code and that there were only a limited number of ways to implement certain routines; therefore the code (and comments!) happened to be identical.

At that point, another of the veterans who is good at machine level programming challenged him to something relatively simple: implement Bubblesort in 6502 machine code. The idea was that even a such small example would yield a number of different implementations. Everyone were invited, but to send their code to the maintainer instead of posting publically. In the end, I think we were 10-15 people, if not more, who all implemented Bubblesort in slightly different variations and efficience. Needless to say, the wannabee never finished his implementation, but posted parts of the short routine, full of useless, surplus instructions and wrong assumptions.

I picked up a few of my computer science books on datastructures and algorithms, and went to implement Quicksort. The first attempt failed, but after changing to a different algorithm, I got it working and submitted it as a bonus.

[CP/M User]

carlsson wrote:

> It all started with some teenager troll/wannabee who
> had frequented newsgroups for years, posting essays
> of garbage, pretending to have a lot of interior
> knowledge and contacts. A few years ago, someone
> asked for programmers to take on an impossible task,
> and even collected a fair sum of money (a few hundred
> $$$) to anyone who could complete the task, which
> still was impossible to implement given the hardware
> restrictions. Like money can stretch hardware
> limitations.

> Anyway, this wannabee decided to take on the task,
> borrowed some development equipment and nothing
> happened for a long time. Then he comes back, posts
> random fragments of code he has picked up from
> various webpages. Yes, it was verified, but he
> claimed it was his own code and that there were only
> a limited number of ways to implement certain
> routines; therefore the code (and comments!) happened
> to be identical.

Sounds awlfully a lot like myself, there are times when I have
these ideas for programs or want to addapt something, though
timely comitments in my other greatest interest - ristricts me
- even some of my friends are even busier than what I am & get
swamped down. Wouldn't say I knock off a lot of code - but I
do a fair deal of interpreting of other peoples code, though
not alternating it to the point it's slightly something else.

Ironically enough, I also made a Bubblesort program - it was
based on a BASIC program - though I translated the routine
into TP - worked just as well. It was funny though, cause a
lot of Bubblesorting programs relied heavily on later TPs, in
comparision though, mine worked with Byte numbers I believe!

CP/M User.

[chuckcmagee]

In 1968, I walked into a small room at my college (UC Riverside, CA) and there it was.... a LOVELY IBM-1130 with NO ONE using it. It only had a FORTRAN compiler available so I learned FORTRAN. Remember those puzzles make out of cubes that make a bigger cube (SOMA). I wrote a FORTRAN program where you give it the total shape and it shows you how to solve the puzzle. I got 2 units of an A grade for that program. It would sit there and whir for 5 minutes before the selectric printer would wake up with the first solution. Man, life was great in college, I should have stayed there :wow:

[CP/M User]

chuckcmagee wrote:

> In 1968, I walked into a small room at my college (UC
> Riverside, CA) and there it was.... a LOVELY IBM-1130
> with NO ONE using it. It only had a FORTRAN compiler
> available so I learned FORTRAN. Remember those
> puzzles make out of cubes that make a bigger cube
> (SOMA). I wrote a FORTRAN program where you give it
> the total shape and it shows you how to solve the
> puzzle. I got 2 units of an A grade for that program.
> It would sit there and whir for 5 minutes before the
> selectric printer would wake up with the first
> solution. Man, life was great in college, I should
> have stayed there :wow:

Great, could you write me one of those Programs which
correctly figures out next lotto numbers, please?!?

CP/M User.

[dreddnott]

I was just talking to my dad last night, it turns out he took FORTRAN in 1973, which was kind of cool. My mom learned WATFIV, anybody know what that is?

[Erik]

I was just talking to my dad last night, it turns out he took FORTRAN in 1973, which was kind of cool. My mom learned WATFIV, anybody know what that is?

WATFIV is FORTRAN. Waterloo FORTRAN IV. Google is your friend! :)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WATFIV_programming_language)

[CP/M User]

Erik wrote:

> WATFIV is FORTRAN. Waterloo FORTRAN IV. Google is
> your friend! :)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WATFIV_programming_language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WATFIV_programming_language))
-------------^^^^^^^^^

Or Wikipedia in this case! ;-)

Mightn't be completely up to date musical wise - but it's
pretty good. Obviously needs some of the finer things added to
it.

CP/M User.

[dreddnott]

No, Google is my enemy - everybody can know anything now...

[Terry Yager]

Wikipedia is rapidly becoming my enemy as well, after many yearz as a faithful user. Watch for my soon-to-be-forthcoming rant.

--T

[carlsson]

Yeah, an encyclopedia written by the people is a dual edged sword. Often it will end up with actual, helpful information, but in matters of history or as in this case people, it could become ugly. However, I suggest you write your own accurate story, point out the inaccuracies in tabloid press and subsequently Wikipedia. Find help from someone about search engine optimization to make your page the first one to appear on a web search.

Anyway, it is refreshing to see that Wikipedia is about posting stuff that can be verified, not neccessarily the truth. ;-) A commercially edited encyclopedia would probably work in the other way around, trying to verify all sources to find the truth and nothing but the truth.

[CP/M User]

carlsson wrote:

> Yeah, an encyclopedia written by the people is a dual
> edged sword. Often it will end up with actual,
> helpful information, but in matters of history or as
> in this case people, it could become ugly. However, I
> suggest you write your own accurate story, point out
> the inaccuracies in tabloid press and subsequently
> Wikipedia. Find help from someone about search engine
> optimization to make your page the first one to
> appear on a web search.

> Anyway, it is refreshing to see that Wikipedia is
> about posting stuff that can be verified, not
> neccessarily the truth. ;-) A commercially edited
> encyclopedia would probably work in the other way
> around, trying to verify all sources to find the
> truth and nothing but the truth.

I personally like Wikipedia for the music, it would be good if
they had people sharning their thoughts about albums from
certain eras - cause Wikipedia sorts them out so well - I mean
you can have albums sorted by year, decade, groups sorted by
era, etc. Some albums have a bit more information about it
than others of course, but ya can't argue with a track
listing (well unless someone stuffed up).

Next I reckon it'd be good to dive into the CDs which might
include an entire album a band/performer in particular did
earlier on all jumbled up onto CD - cause there's a number of
Greatest Hits, Anthology or just other CDs which do that. Even
EP records which have been stuck onto CD be good - for people
who might see an album & wonder if it's worth collecting. I
personally like to find out if a CD has an entire album - get
the track listing & program the CD player to play it that way
cause it's usually interesting to hear it in the same vein
that the original Vinyl was produced.

CP/M User.