Language change and code breaks

[Bengt Richter]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 10:33:00 -0700, Chris Barker <chrishbarker at home.net> wrote:
[...]
>lives on!. In fact, I think that if Fortran 77 introduced dynamic memory
>allocation, it would be living even larger than it is: that was kind of
>a deal killer for a lot of stuff. By the way, Fortran 90/95 is pretty
>darn nice language.
Does 90/95 have it?

I jiggered the Fortran runtime library for a version of DEC fortran on
the PDP-11 to provide dynamic memory allocation. Used two-dimensional
array trick subverting array access to use an allocation handle in
one index instead of a normal one. Call the trick allocation for
a handle and index into the allocated space 1-dimensionally with the other
index from the POV of the Fortran program. That was in the 70's ;-)

I used it to pass parameters in a cooperative multitasking program that
essentially did between dispatched fortran subroutines what windows does
with its message passing. The main dispatching loop was a Fortran do loop.
I was also painting multiple rectangular sub-windows
on a screen with cursors and responding to an asynchronous mix of inputs,
including a track ball.

In a parallel universe I'm sure I'm a billionaire ;-))