Language change and code breaks

[Kevin Rodgers]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>>I'll just chime in to say that as one who uses Python for
>>science/engineering, I would be very unhappy not to be able to define the
>>variables h and H to mean two different things.  Engineers often uses
>>case to distinguish between the function and it's Fourier transform for
>>example.
>>
> 
> How did engineers cope with Fortran?  Fortran has long been the
> preferred language for engineers, after C.S. folks moved on to C and
> C++...
> 
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
> 

In the late-eighties through early-nineties, I worked on a program where 
we were restricted to pure-ANSI Fortran 77 - including 6-character 
monocase variable names.  Yes, it was painful, but since a big part of 
what I was doing involved manipulating 4-dimensional arrays of data, and 
since C's support for multidimensional arrays is rather lacking (I think 
the technical term is "sucks"), I'd take Fortran any day.  Even 
something that you'd think C should excel at, namely concatenating 
strings, is much easier in Fortran (using the // operator) than in C 
(quick - write down the exact syntax for strcat() from memory).

These days, I only hack Fortran if I'm using a legacy code, but despite 
its quirks, one shouldn't underestimate just how well it served its 
target audience . . .

--
Kevin Rodgers
"This one goes up to eleven."  --  Nigel Tufnel