[Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[John Hearns]

> Most compilers had extensions from the IV/66 (or 77) – quoted strings,
for instance, instead of Hollerith constants, and free form input.  Some
allowed array index origins other than 1

I can now date exactly when the rot set in.
Hollerith constants are good enough for anyone. It's a gosh darned
computer, not your nearest and dearest whispering in your ear. It still
thinks it is talking to a thundering line printer and getting its input
from a real Teletype.

Indexing from zero - who ever heard of zero of a thing. Damn quiche eaters.



On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 22:27, Lux, Jim (US 7140) via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> Yes, the evil-ution of languages proceeded at a much more stately pace in
> “arpanet” days.
>
>
>
> Typically, you’d have a bunch of vendor specific versions, and since PCs
> per-se didn’t exist, you bought the compiler for the machine you had.  And
> then, maybe you paid attention to the notes in the back of the manual about
> deviations from the Fortran IV, 66, or 77.  Most compilers had extensions
> from the IV/66 (or 77) – quoted strings, for instance, instead of Hollerith
> constants, and free form input.  Some allowed array index origins other
> than 1 (handy for FFTs where you wanted to go from -N/2 to N/2).  Most also
> had some provision for direct access to files, as opposed to sequential,
> but it was very, very OS dependent.
>
>
>
> Probably by the 80s and early 90s, with widespread use of personal
> computers, and the POSIX standard, you started to see more “machine
> independent, standards compliant” Fortran. And, you saw the idea of buying
> your compiler from someone different than the computer maker, i.e.
> companies like Absoft and Portland Group (now part of nvidia), partly
> because the microcomputer manufacturers had no interest in developing
> compilers for cheap processors, and sometimes to accommodate a specialized
> need.  Hence products like Fortran for 8080 under CP/M from Digital
> Research.  ( I ran Cromemco Fortran IV in 48k of RAM on my mighty Cromemco
> Z80 at 4MHz, which I believe was a variant of Fortran-80 from DR)
>
>
>
> But even then, it was a pretty slow evolution – the Fortran compilers I
> was running in the 80s on microcomputers under MS-DOS wasn’t materially
> different from the Fortran I was running in 1978 on a Z80, which wasn’t
> significantly different from the Fortran I ran on mainframes (IBM 360, CDC
> 6xxx, etc.) and minis (IBM 1130, PDP-11 in the 60s and 70s. What would
> change is things like the libraries available to do “non-standard” stuff
> (like random disk access).
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org> on behalf of "
> beowulf at beowulf.org" <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Reply-To: *Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov>
> *Date: *Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:21 PM
> *To: *"Renfro, Michael" <Renfro at tntech.edu>, "beowulf at beowulf.org" <
> beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re:
> Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place
>
>
>
> That's exactly what I suspected. I guess 13 years is like an eternity in
> the modern "Speed of the Internet" world we live in, but may not have been
> such a slow evolution time of the pre-Internet days.
>
> Prentice
>
> On 10/19/20 2:53 PM, Renfro, Michael wrote:
>
> Minor point of pedagogy from my place in the "learned FORTRAN 77 in 1990"
> crowd: your instructor's options would have been:
>
>
>
>    - standard FORTRAN 77
>    - vendor-specific dialect of FORTRAN (VAX or otherwise)
>    - maybe a pre-release of FORTRAN 90? Wasn't released and standardized
>    until 1991-92.
>
>
>
> Never mind the availability of texts for same.
>
>
>
> *From: *Beowulf <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>
> <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>
> *Date: *Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM
> *To: *beowulf at beowulf.org <beowulf at beowulf.org> <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re:
> Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place
>
>
> On 10/19/20 10:28 AM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
> > --snip--
> >
> >> Unfortunately the presumption seems to be that the old is deficient
> >> because it is old, and "my generation†didn't invent it (which is
> >> clearly perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, … which
> are
> >> all older than any of our programming languages, and which adapt, as do
> >> our programming languages).
> >>
> > I think this has a lot to do with the Fortran situation. In these
> "modern"
> > times, software seems to have gone from "releases" to a "sliding
> > constant release" cycle and anything not released in the past few
> > months is "old."
> >
> > How many people here will wait a 2-6 months before installing
> > a "new version" of some package in production to make sure there
> > are no major issues. And of course keep older version options
> > with software modules. Perhaps because I've been at this a while,
> > I have a let it "mellow a bit" approach to shinny new software.
> >
> > I find it odd that Fortran gets placed in the "old software box"
> > because it works while new languages with their constant feature
> > churn and versions break dependency trees all over the place,
> > and somehow that is good thing. Now get off my lawn.
> >
> > --
> > Doug
> >
> Now we're starting to veer of course a little here, but what the hell...
>
> I think that one of the problems with Fortran is a complete
> misunderstanding of it's purpose. People are always shocked when I tell
> them the scientists I support are "still" using Fortran. Many people
> think that C and C++ replaced Fortran, but that is not true. C was
> designed to do low-level programming for tasks like writing operating
> systems, and C++ is just an extension of the C language to support
> Object-Oriented Programming. Both C and C++ are lower-level and more
> general purpose than Fortran.
>
> Fortran is a domain-specific language, meaning it was meant for a
> special purpose, which in this case is doing mathematical operations,
> and it's very good for those sorts of things. It's trivial to create
> multidimensional arrays in Fortran, which is useful for many math
> operations, but C doesn't even support anything beyond 1D  arrays. Sure
> you can mimic multidimensional arrays by keeping track of stride length,
> etc., but that's a lot of work, and I'm betting that's work a lot of
> scientists would rather not do. That's just one example of Fortran being
> friendlier for science. I'm sure there are other examples, but I'm not a
> programmer, and definitely NOT a Fortran programmer.
>
> I think the main reason most people look at Fortran as an old and
> outdated language is because it stuck to the "punch card" formatting
> long after punch cards and punch card readers disappeared, but I'm not
> sure who to blame for that. Do I blame my freshman "Programming for
> Engineers" instructor who taught me Fortran 77 in 1991, or do I blame
> whoever maintains the Fortran standard for not updating it before then?
> (I honestly don't know what the latest version of Fortran was in the
> fall of 1991).
>
> Prentice
>
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> --
>
> Prentice Bisbal
>
> Lead Software Engineer
>
> Research Computing
>
> Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
>
> http://www.pppl.gov <https://urldefense.us/v3/__http:/www.pppl.gov__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!dbjGYkPB4I_e3Mpwg3ymxEHvrBoG1cZSjqXNtiKg304pOV-Gy0YzVZwDH06Ry2bL3ZCPgrk$>
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