[Beowulf] g77 limits...

[Gerry Creager N5JXS]

Jim Lux wrote:
> At 10:54 AM 2/23/2006, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Joe Landman wrote:
>>
>>>>   b) Alas, I'm probably going to have to become one (again).
>>>
>>>
>>> Heh... people complained that I wrote my Perl, C, and even Assembler 
>>> in Fortran for a while.  Now they complain that I write it all in C.  
>>> Its not so hard to switch back and forth.  The hard part is the IO.  
>>> Format statements are annoying.
>>
>>
>> Yeah, I/O sucks.  String manipulation in general used to suck.  Column
>> indentation and continuation rules suck (if they're still there).
> 
> 
> Surely you saved some of your old drum cards?  Makes the whole 
> indentation thing easier.

And an old drum!  But eventually, I trained my thumbs to do 6 spaces on 
the ADM-3A.

>>   Not
>> having structs and pointers sucks (I just LOVE to play pointer magic
>> games and roll my own data objects).
> 
> 
> All art and creativity is enhanced by limititations of the medium. I, 
> for one, find that the fact that FORTRAN has a native complex type 
> (since IV days, and maybe even FORTRAN II had it) and exponentiation as 
> a native operator has been more useful than structs and pointers (all 
> that dynamic allocations stuff just gets you into trouble) which only 
> get you into trouble anyway).  And FORTRAN does have the EQUIVALENCE 
> statement, which, especially with named common, can be used to create a 
> form of struct.
> 
> Sure, FORTRAN's not a string processing language (it's FORmula 
> TRANslation, after all). It's meant to do REAL science and engineering 
> work, like finite element models for weather prediction and nuclear 
> weapons design, or orbital mechanics calculations for ICBMs and Apollo. 
> If you want to move data from one column to another you can use RPG or 
> COBOL or plugboards on your Electric Accounting Machinery.  You want to 
> do that namby pamby character and string stuff that english and 
> linguistics types are interested in, or work in abstract worlds, use 
> SNOBOL or LISP.

A.  No one should HAVE to use COBOL.  I've written the one program I was 
required to write therein.

B.  Didn't know anyone else remembered SNOBOL.

>>   All of which may well be doable
>> nowadays -- did I mention that it was fortran >>IV<< that I learned?
>> Running on an IBM mainframe running MVS, JCL, HASP and all that?
> 
> 
> yes, modern FORTRANs allows user defined types, etc. (although g77 might 
> not. An old manual I have says that STRUCTURE, UNION, RECORD, and MAP 
> are all not yet implemented)  Note, all upper case, because real 
> programmers use punched cards, and neither the 026 or 029 keypunches 
> have lower case.

The HP Fortran5/pre77 implemented all these about 1980!  And, upper-case 
is good for the soul.  Real programmers really do shout!

>> Hopefully "modern" fortran is a whole lot closer to C and supports some
>> sort of struct/union or equivalent thereof, and some sort of dynamical
>> memory allocation.
> 
> 
> F77 had dynamic array allocation (you can do DIMENSION X(*))
> 
> 
>>>>   c) Working on some problems with potentially very large memory
>>>> allocations.
>>>
>>>
>>> Shouldn't be too hard using g95/gfortran.  Can you look at out of 
>>> core type solutions (blocked access).
>>
>>
>> Don't know.  FIRST the funding, THEN the work.  No Way In Hell am I
>> going to learn fortran (again, any flavor) unless I have to, that is to
>> say "Will program for food"...;-)
>>
>> Though I agree, sure, and said as much to greg.  I'm HOPING that this is
>> possible, although just finding a common denominator a la F IV, F77,
>> F95, gfortran -- standards are your friend, sure, and F95 compilers can
>> PROBABLY still compile my old FIV sources, but stil...

Gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843