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Who's into FORTRAN?

"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...
 
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
 
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Long time ago during a trainee ship period 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.
 
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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 on hand :)

It's had lots of updates, hardware projects & yes some new
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.
 
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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.
 
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.
 
"> 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.
 
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.
 
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
 
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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
 
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.
 
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.
 
"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.
 
Re: Fortran

Re: Fortran

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.
 
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.
 
carlsson said:
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
 
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).
 
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