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Comment FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and "I Don't Know" (Score 1) 744

I bet most people who answered FORTRAN come from a particular era... mainframes with general access...

I met FORTRAN on Ohio State Univ's brand new IBM 370 mainframe. Used the WATFOR and WATFIV compilers from Univ. of Waterloo, and we all enjoyed punning off the name of the textbook. I still have that book... sometimes I wish I could find as good a textbook for the languages I teach now.

Things I learned in the summer of 1971:

  1. Initialize counting variables outside of your FOR loops, not inside...
  2. You never really appreciate sequence numbers until you drop your card deck.
  3. Smaller is better: if a program is completely buggy, adding statements probably isn't going to fix it.
  4. You don't actually need a program, if your data deck contains a properly-formatted ASCII picture. Just list the data directly to the printer.
  5. "Self-serve terminal room" means that if you make the line printer shoot fan-fold paper all the way across the room, everybody expects you to service it yourself.
  6. I liked FORTRAN better than calculus.
  7. Text processing is not FORTRAN's forte. (so to speak)

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