General Programming Question

[Mike_Z]

Well..... I like a flow chart. Suppose it depends on if your a visual person or not. I knew a guy who could look at a table of numbers and see patterns in them, I can't. My first program, that actually did something, was a deck of cards that was fed into a Burroughs 5500 in 1965, and I'll tell you that it is difficult to see anything in a deck of cards, much less that just keeping them in order. So, I'll stick with a flow chart to help me understand and will continue to program in Octal. If it works, use it, if not, do something else. If you can't live by that 'stick it in your ear'. Thanks for the help. Mike

 

[Mike_Z]

Yesterday I found the problem (bug) in my program. I didn't have a nested call/return problem. It turned out to be a stack problem. I had moved my defined words to make some room for the source program, but forgot to move the stack and it got over run. So who knows where the program was branching to.

The discussion of this thread got me to thinking about some of the FORTRAN programming I did years ago. I found my old FORTRAN text. It was written by a guy named Daniel D. McCracken. Spent some time reading this. I had forgotten that to get data into or out of the machine, you had to use READ and WRITE statements. Plus you had to attach a FORMAT statement that defined each value, it's type and size. Then of course there were the computer cards and the programming coding forms. AND there is a section on Flow charting in the front of the book. Apparently that must have struck a chord with me, since I still find them helpful.

READ,(5,23) A,B,C
23 FORMAT (3.F10.0)

Mike

 

[Chuck(G)]

Yup, McCracken back in the day was one of the better texts. There were several editions of that book, going back to FORTRAN II. Back then, every vendor seemed to have their little "twist" on FORTRAN. (e.g.1 "B" punch in column 1 signified that the arithmetic operators were Boolean, etc.). Even FORTRAN IV had many vendor variations, including FORTRAN V from Univac.

I served as an alternate on ANSI X3J3 while F90 was being brewed. Among other things, we decided that "Fortran" was an acceptable variation of "FORTRAN". Generally, I feel that F90 (and later versions) was a bit of a mishmash--i.e. not all that backward-compatible with, say, F77. I think that F77 was the last "good" FORTRAN. But times change, and one has to keep up with the hardware and software practices of our times.

Back in the day, not everyone used the same character set--there were lots of 6-bit character machines, for example. Word sizes were all over the place. IBM used 32-bit words, CDC used 60 on some machines; 24 and 48 on others and 64 on at least one. DEC used 36 and 16 bits...

But it was still possible to write extremely portable programs using FORTRAN. Prime Computers initially used FORTRAN to implement PRIMOS, their operating system. Eventually, they converted to a dialect of PL/I.