Subj : Re: Industry Calls for More Foreign Programmers
To   : comp.programming
From : spinoza1111
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 04:31 am


blmblm@myrealbox.com wrote:
> In article <1124443672.965711.76370@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
>  <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> [ snip ]
>
> >
> >The brutal truth: if, for example, a programmer has specialized in
> >financial Fortran for several years, he will not have adopted the
> >structured, storage management, and (god forbid) object-oriented (if
> >any) improvements to Fortran but will stick to canonical Fortran,
> >including overuse of overexposed common data and Equivalence for shits
> >and giggles.
>
> What do you mean by "canonical Fortran", and what objections if any
> do you have to making use of features included in Fortran standards
> later than FORTRAN 77?
>
> (Really, I suppose I'm asking whether you're aware that Fortran has
> evolved significantly from the days when there was no way to define
> data structures other than arrays, or allocate memory dynamically,
> without using non-standard extensions.  Maybe you are.)

Maybe I am. Oops, I am. However, I have experience, observer and not
participant, of two Fortran communities. One was the Princeton
supercomputer community in the early 1990s, and the other was the
Chicago rocket science financial community in the early 2000s.

In both, developers AVOIDED the new features of Fortran for no reason
except conservatism.

In the latter community, using the newer features was frowned upon to a
degree.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> --
> | B. L. Massingill
> | ObDisclaimer:  I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.

.