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Steve Lionel (Intel)

My life in an online community began on the PLATO IV system in 1974, continued on ARPANET in the late 1970s, CompuServe and then this newfangled Internet tube-thingy. I joined Intel in 2001 coming from DEC/Compaq where I was a Fortran compiler developer. Nowadays I focus more on the support and "evangelizing" side of things, including my "Doctor Fortran" column which I started in 1998 and which I suppose could be considered a blog. I've been in the same office in Nashua, New Hampshire, since 1988, but I'm on my third company badge. Outside of work I like to read science fiction, build web sites and travel.

Doctor Fortran in "Think, Thank, Thunk"

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on September 2, 2009 at 11:39 am
Comments (1)

Learn about "thunks" used to supply context to internal procedures, and what NOT to do with them!

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Category: Software Engineering

Doctor Fortran in "I've Come Here For An Argument, Side 2"

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on July 10, 2009 at 11:20 am
Comments (11)

My earlier post, "I've Come Here For An Argument", was very popular with my fellow support engineers, as it provided a convenient answer to questions they frequently receive.  (For me too, which in part is why I wrote it!) But some people (cough, Ron, cough) are never satisfied, and I've been asked to write a [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Doctor Fortran in "Revert! Revert! The End (of the format) is Nigh!"

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on July 1, 2009 at 11:08 am
Comments (2)

Doctor Fortran lifts the veil from another little-understood language feature, format reversion.

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Category: Software Engineering

Doctor Fortran in "I've Come Here For An Argument"

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on March 31, 2009 at 11:57 am
Comments (12)

One of the most fundamental aspects of Fortran programming is passing arguments to procedures.  It is also one of the most misunderstood aspects.  In this space today I'll try to make things clearer. First, some terminology.  In Fortran, there are "actual arguments" and "dummy arguments".  An actual argument is what you put inside the parentheses in [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Doctor Fortran in "Too Much of a Good Thing?"

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on January 23, 2009 at 10:59 am
Comments (9)

A lot of Fortran programmers take the "belt and suspenders" approach to coding, with explicit declarations of every attribute they want for a symbol.  In general, this is good practice, especially when combined with IMPLICIT NONE to force you to say what you mean.  But some programmers take this a bit too far and it [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

It was thirty years ago today

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on October 2, 2008 at 11:18 am
Comments (8)

Today is my thirtieth anniversary of working for Intel, but that includes my years at DEC and Compaq.  As an actual Intel employee, it's a bit over seven years.  Anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity to reminisce. I imagine most of you will find this boring; if so, feel free to go [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

What Happens in Vegas...

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on September 12, 2008 at 8:03 am
Comments (3)

110 degrees in the shade, 9 Fortran geeks and dozens of comments and complaints about Fortran: it must be another J3 meeting in Las Vegas!   J3 is the US Fortran Standards Technical Committee, a subcommittee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS).  J3 works closely with the International Fortran Standards Committee (ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC22/WG5) and [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

MIXing it up with Donald Knuth

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on April 28, 2008 at 7:23 am
Comments (1)

The other day, I ran across an interesting interview with Donald Knuth. Knuth, of course, is world-famous as the creator of the Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures (1 potrzebie = The thickness of issue #26 of MAD Magazine - just ask Google!) Only slightly less known is Knuth's series of books The Art of [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Dick Hustvedt, the consummate software engineer

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on April 23, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Comments (5)

I've written a couple of "farewell" posts before, but this one is personal. I learned today that Dick Hustvedt died last week, and my heart is heavy. As I knew him, Dick was one of the principal architects and developers of the VAX/VMS operating system and a major force behind the development of the VAXcluster. I [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Doctor, it hurts when I do this!

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on March 31, 2008 at 10:52 am
Comments (10)

It is often said that you can write bad code in any language, and I certainly can't argue with that. I do find, though, that the worst-looking code comes from programmers who are more familiar with another programming language. One can often tell that a C programmer wrote Fortran code, or that a [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on August 22, 2007 at 7:09 am
Comments (4)

MAGIC WORD XYZZY For computer geeks of a certain age, such as yours truly, it was an opportunity to relive the glorious past when Dennis Jerz announced that an early 1977 version of Will Crowther's Adventure game source code had been discovered. Adventure was one of the first puzzle-exploration games and it not only captured the [...]

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Category: Gaming, Software Engineering

Not Dead Yet!

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on May 25, 2007 at 5:58 am
Comments (7)

At least once a week, I see someone refer to Fortran as a "dead" language. A recent interview I did included asking me if I worried about my job since "many people say there is no future in Fortran". So it was with some amusement that I ran across an article on the Computerworld web site [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

And a Farewell to John

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on March 20, 2007 at 5:38 am
Comments (0)

John Backus, the creator of Fortran, passed away Saturday, March 17, at the age of 82. The New York Times has a nice obituary. I never met Mr. Backus, but my life and career has certainly been inflienced by his work.

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Category: Software Engineering

A Farewell to Jean

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on March 5, 2007 at 8:38 am
Comments (3)

If you asked me what my favorite programming language is, you might be surprised when I don't say Fortran. No, my favorite is Ada, the language named for the first computer programmer and the result of an international competition sponsored by the US Department of Defense. Jean Ichbiah, the creator of the "Green" language which [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Powerful Beyond Imagination

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on November 16, 2006 at 2:57 am
Comments (2)

No, the title of this post isn't intended to refer to the new quad-core processors Intel announced yesterday (as I write this), though I suppose it could. Rather, it's the slogan of this year's SC06 (Supercomputing 2006) conference, whose US edition this year is being held in sunny Tampa, Florida. And yours truly is there. This [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Domestic or Imported?

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on October 5, 2006 at 3:15 am
Comments (5)

One day while I was wandering the aisles of my local grocery store, a woman beckoned me over to a table and asked if I would like to "try some imported chocolate?" Neatly arrayed on the table were packages of Lindt, Toblerone, and... Ghiradelli? I asked the woman if California had seceded from the Union, [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

The long and winding road

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on September 25, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Comments (0)

The other day, I posted something in comp.lang.fortran in response to a post asking for a new feature in the Intel Fortran compiler. I suggested that the best thing to do was to submit an issue to Intel Premier Support asking for the feature since the more customers who ask for a feature, the easier [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

Nifty Fifty!

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on July 24, 2006 at 7:28 pm
Comments (3)

2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Fortran language, which was first introduced in 1957. The British Computer Society is sponsoring a retrospective on Fortran in January - perhaps there will be a US event as well. Like most programming languages, Fortran, or FORTRAN as it was known back then, has gone through a lot [...]

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Category: Software Engineering

The Doctor is IN!

By Steve Lionel (Intel) (19 posts) on July 11, 2006 at 8:00 am
Comments (8)

.. testing. testing... Is this thing on? Oh, hi! Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Doctor Fortran 2.0. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Steve Lionel, and I work for Intel's Developer Products Division. For the past four years, I've been part of Intel's compiler support team, but before that I spent nearly a [...]

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Category: Software Engineering