Author's Blogs
Posted Março 31st 200914
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 ...
Posted Janeiro 23rd 200913
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 ...
Posted Outubro 2nd 20088
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 ...
Posted Setembro 12th 20083
Posted Abril 28th 20081
The other day, I ran across an interesting interview with Donald Knuth. Knuth, of course, is world-famous as the creator of the ...
Posted Abril 23rd 20086
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 ...
Posted Março 31st 200810
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 ...
Posted Agosto 22nd 20074
MAGIC WORD XYZZYFor 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 ...
Posted Maio 25th 20077
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 titled ...
Posted Março 20th 20071
John Backus, the creator of Fortran, passed away Saturday, March 17, at the age of 82. The New York Times has a ...