> On 7/3/2010 6:03 PM, Olin Lathrop wrote:
>> Dario Greggio wrote:
>>    
>>>> http://everything2.com/title/Changing+the+value+of+5+in+FORTRAN
>>>>        
>>> this is simply crazy :)
>>> I'm glad I never used Fortran
>>>      
>> It's not really that crazy, and not really the fault of Fortran either,
>> other than it didn't have subroutine prototypes.  Without knowing that TWEAK
>> could change its call argument, the compiler can't prohibit passing a
>> constant to it.  You could argue that not having subroutine prototypes is
>> crazy.  I would agree for a modern language, but Fortran being the first
>> real compiled computer language, "crazy" is rather unfair.  Sure, it looks
>> primitive from today's standpoint, but it was a real advance in its day.


:) I did not mean to say that Fortran as a whole is "crazy", but this 
part surely is.
I also read the in-depth description about the issue. I agree with you 
that "they were old times" and that those literals/variables could be 
placed in ROM.

I am simply glad that I never used Fortran... so to say :) this is one 
further argument about that. I faced a "mini" version back at C64 times, 
and possibly I almost got to work to it in 1988 when working for a big 
firm where PL/1 and Cobol were deeply in use (together with Oracle DB).
I did not like them all three.

Some months later, I got to know C and never left it :)

-- 

Ciao, Dario
--
Cyberdyne
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