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

Tue Oct 20 07:51:15 PDT 2020

Why just a few weeks ago, while translating an algorithm description in text (1 based indices) to Python, I screwed up the indices in arrays I was building by hand. A few A[1,1] that should have been A[0,0].

One of the corner cases, though, is where mathematics uses 0 indices is in polynomials and series expansions, where the index matches the exponent of X..  sum of [ A[i] * x^i/factorial(i)] kinds of things

From: Jim Cownie <jcownie at gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 1:13 AM
To: John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com>
Cc: Jim Lux <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>, "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

Indexing from zero - who ever heard of zero of a thing. Damn quiche eaters.
Note that by default arrays are also indexed from 1 in Julia… I wonder who they're trying to attract :-)
There are also people working on interactive Fortran in “notebook”s (e.g. https://lfortran.org/<https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/lfortran.org/__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!c-aWiyODjwSo50dW5Q3cXH2mJBhypLMygw4UBq3lyyG660U51JMSiQvtxpJnoSqRrX3tgBA$> )

On 20 Oct 2020, at 09:00, John Hearns <hearnsj at gmail.com<mailto:hearnsj at gmail.com>> wrote:

> 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<mailto: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<mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>> on behalf of "beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>" <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>>
Reply-To: Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov<mailto:pbisbal at pppl.gov>>
Date: Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:21 PM
To: "Renfro, Michael" <Renfro at tntech.edu<mailto:Renfro at tntech.edu>>, "beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org>" <beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto: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><mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org>
Date: Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf at beowulf.org> <beowulf at beowulf.org><mailto: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 generationâ€ didn't invent it (which is
>> clearly perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, â€¦ 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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-- Jim
James Cownie <jcownie at gmail.com<mailto:jcownie at gmail.com>>
Mob: +44 780 637 7146

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