Fortran

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For a programming language with a half-century legacy, FORTRAN not surprisingly has accumulated its share of jokes and folklore.

Contents

[edit] Sourced

  • People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example.
    • Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of PROLOG, MIT Press

[edit] Unsourced

  • God is Real, unless declared Integer.
    • J. Allan Toogood, FORTRAN programmer (In FORTRAN, undeclared variables can be typed according to their first letter, so "God" would be a real variable, under default implicit typing rules.)
  • The sooner the world forgets that FORTRAN ever existed, the better.
  • The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
    • Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
  • Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
    • Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
  • Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
    • Easter egg in the SDS/Xerox Sigma 7 FORTRAN compiler, when the statement GO TO JAIL was encountered.
  • "A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune.

[edit] References in popular culture

  • In the pilot episode of the Futurama series, the robot Bender drinks a bottle of Olde FORTRAN Malt Liquor (alluding to "Olde English" malt liquor)
  • Computer folklore has incorrectly attributed the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a syntax error in a Fortran program. For example, "Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"[1].
  • In 1982, 10,000 Maniacs released a song named "Planned Obsolescence" that includes the repeated line — "Science [is] truth for life, in Fortran tongue the answer".

[edit] References

  1. Hoare, C. A. R.. Hints on Programming Language Design.  in Sigact/Sigplan Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. October 1973. , reprinted in Horowitz. Programming Languages, A Grand Tour, 3rd ed. . See Risks Digest: Mariner 1, Vol. 9: Iss. 54, 12 Dec 89 (and Risks Digest: "Mariner I -- no holds BARred", Vol. 8: Iss. 75, for what really happened])