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Message from discussion Fortran Myths & Disinformation Wanted
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bglbv  
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 More options Feb 5 1999, 3:00 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
From: bg...@my-dejanews.com
Date: 1999/02/05
Subject: Re: Fortran Myths & Disinformation Wanted
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Martin Ambuhl <mamb...@earthlink.net> writes:
> "Craig T. Dedo" wrote:
> >         1.  Fortran is 3 way IF statements and one-trip DO loops.
> >         2.  Fortran encourages unstructured code and spaghetti-style control flow.
> >         3.  Fortran can't do Windows.
> >         4.  Fortran is unportable.  If you really want portability, you should write
> > your program in C.
> >         5.  Fortran is only for scientific and engineering applications.
> >         6.  The only real fortran is FORTRAN 77 (or, FORTRAN 66).
> >         7.  Fortran can't call system routines.
> >         8.  You can't do character string operations easily in Fortran.
> >         9.  Only Microsoft makes a PC-based Fortran compiler of any importance.
> >         10.  Fortran is a dead language.  No one uses it any more to write important
> > applications.
> You are emphasizing expansion at the expense of truth.  In particular,
> over a history of 35 years of programming I have never heard #1, #3, #4,
> #5, #6, #7, or #9.  #2 and #8 reflect a reality about much legacy
> Fortran code and are probably widely believed.  If someone asserted #10,
> I would be suspicious of his general computing knowlege.

And yet #10 is one of the most commonly heard claims about Fortran, so
I for one would not blame Craig for listing it.

#8 is a statement about the language itself, not about particular
applications written in it. It has been a wrong statement since 1978,
and even more so since 1991 (TRIM, ADJUSTL, etc.) At least if your
comparison is with C, Pascal, Ada, etc. If you are comparing to
Snobol or Perl, that's another story.

I don't think I've heard the others verbatim, but certainly some of
the things I've heard (and read on this newsgroup) came very close.

> You should also know that COBOL suffers much more than Fortran in this
> respect.  I suspect that the Fortran community is replete with people
> who make ugly noises about COBOL that are more misinformed than any of
> the items you list for Fortran.  The analog to #10 is frequently found,
> even though the code-base for COBOL outstrips any other language.

There has been a fair amount of Cobol (with mixed case, for the same
reasons as Fortran) advocacy over on comp.lang.ada recently.

That said, #10 is a statement not about the size of the code base (we
all know there is a lot of legacy code in both Fortran and Cobol) but
about its current rate of growth.

> I also know that frequently anti-C postings are made in comp.lang.c
> which demonstrate that the version of C the posters know is about 1972,
> certainly before the 1989 standard.  If Fortran partisans can insist
> that C is still at pre-standard 1972 levels, then surely they have no
> room to squeal if others think Fortran ossified to F77 or F66.

Do those postings in comp.lang.c really come from Fortran users?

And is this thread at all about squealing? I thought it was about
identifying common misconceptions to be debunked in an information
campaign. There is no reason the supporters of C and Cobol couldn't
do the same, to the benefit of us all. (There is already a thread
on comp.lang.ada discussing ways of encouraging the use of Ada.
That is perhaps more aggressive than the one we have here, in that
the goal is to increase Ada _market share_ whereas our only immediate
interest seems to lie in increasing _respect_ for Fortran.)


 
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