Fortran (Was: The "does Python have variables?" debate)

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 13 May 2014 03:22:28 Steven D'Aprano did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On Tue, 13 May 2014 02:31:14 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > People who write buggy self-modifying code aren't paying attention.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > IMO, people who bad-mouth self-modifying code are folks who don't
> > have the patience to do it right, because stable self-modifying code
> > CAN most certainly be done.
> 
> Many things *can* be done. The question is, is it worth the effort to
> do it? The simplest code that meets the functional requirements is
> usually the best.
> 
> > Stable, dead reliable self modifying code CAN be written, I have done
> > it. And that code was still in use at the tv station that I wrote it
> > for 15 years later.
> 
> Yep, and people have written stable, dead reliable unstructured code
> using GOTO and possibly even COMEFROM too. Nevertheless, nobody serious
> uses unstructured code these days. It takes much more effort to get it
> stable and reliable in the first place. Maintenance is ten or a hundred
> times harder and therefore more expensive. Chances are good that the
> software you wrote 15 years ago is now a black box: it damn well better
> work, because no-one knows how it works well enough to debug problems
> or add new functionality.
> 
> And after 15 years, I daresay that includes you.

Actually, 34 years, but I have the advantage of having retained a copy on 
dead tree as well as a broadcast cart with a couple copies of it, on a 
shelf above where I am sitting.  And, should tape machine ballistics 
change, I left an extensive tome on how to adjust it for that.

The 1802 is a somewhat limited beast, but for all the processing it had to 
do on the falling edge of each vertical drive pulse (it drove the raw, 
homemade character generator to lay a new academy leader among other 
things), it had all the data constructed to generate those characters with 
6 dma cycles per video field, and was all done in the middle of line 21 of 
an ntsc field, twiddling its thumbs until the next falling edge of house 
vertical drive.  I also invented a drop frame version of the time code 
with half the error of the official version. Just because I could.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS