Error Testing

[William Ray Wing]

On Oct 31, 2013, at 1:17 PM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:

> On 2013-10-31, rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, October 31, 2013 8:50:27 PM UTC+5:30, Neil Cerutti wrote:
>>> wrote:
>>>> This suggests that Pascal went against established practice.
>>>> This is false. FORTRAN used = and that was a mistake caused by
>>>> the language being hacked together haphazardly.
>>> Respectfully, the designers of FORTRAN deserve more respect than
>>> that characterization accords.
>> 
>> ???
>> 
>> If I say: "My uncle -- a pilot -- knows more about flying
>> planes than the Wright brothers" am I disrespecting the Wright
>> brothers??
> 
> No, of course not.
> 
>> The state of art shifts with time. Fortran was more pioneering
>> than most languages that followed -- does not mean it got
>> everything right.
> 
> They obviously couldn't have gotten everything right; they had to
> work largely in a vaccuum. but in no sense were they haphazardly
> throwing syntax together. They designed it as well as anyone at
> the time knew how. It's stood the test of time, too. There's
> probably a lot more FORTRAN in use and maintained today than
> Wright Brothers airplane parts. ;)
> 

Actually, FORTRAN is probably responsible for more CPU cycles being executed even today than most other languages.  If you think about the fact that most large scientific simulation codes (weather forecasting, combustion modeling, finite-element modeling and so on), are still FORTRAN based, and that those are the codes that occupy multi-hundred-thousand-core petaflop class supper computers for weeks on end, you have to respect its longevity.

-Bill



>> From Backus Turing award speech:
>> 
>> Although I refer to conventional languages as "von Neumann
>> languages" to take note of their origin and style, I do not, of
>> course, blame the great mathematician for their complexity. In
>> fact, some might say that I bear some responsibility for that
>> problem.
>> 
>> http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
> 
> Thanks for that reference.
> 
> -- 
> Neil Cerutti
> -- 
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list