FoxTrot by Bill Amend for October 12, 2014

I’m as confused as Peter. What the flip is a fortran?

Fortran the scientific programming language.

I learned Fortran on punch cards

I loved that I didn’t fully recognize the language until Jason gave the punch line. I’m amazed by the newness of it (while fully aware this gag could have been done a dozen time before).

Me too, on the IBM 370. Back when a hard disk drive was about the size of a washing machine.

It is definitely not “classic” FORTRAN (II, IV or 77), but the code snippet looks like it was copied from the Wikipedia section describing “Fortran 90”.

WATFIV, you don’t need any stinking STRINGS!

COBOL on punch cards. I’m impressed! I read the description of the class; didn’t understand the description; didn’t take the class. Now I wish I had, even if I’d have failed it miserably, ’cuz I would have at least learned SOMEthing.

There are a lot of “legacy” programs still out there that were written in Fortran 40 years ago. They have been patched and modified over the years with confusing or nonexistent comments, making it impractical to rewrite them from scratch in a modern language. So, they get modified as needed. Yes, people are still using Fortran.

Does this make Jason bi-lingual?

We had a Fortran computer in high school. Our teacher said it was impossible to program it to play games. I told him I could make it play a game. He said if I could do that, he would give me an A for the class, so after thinking for a bit, I came up with a tic-tac-toe program based on 5 being the middle square, 1-4 being the corners and 6-9 the side squares. I started with ‘If X = 5 then 2’ meaning if the first person put an X in the middle square, then it would put it’s mark in square #2, a corner square. If X > 5 then 5 and if X < 5 then 5 meaning if the first person put an X in any other square, it would pick the middle square. etc. I got an A for the class and the program made it so that the computer would either win or tie. You could not beat the computer

You can’t keep a good nerd down.

Thanks for the explanation. was clueless too. My idea of a punch card was the roster for the fights.

FORTRAN cookies are sort of dry and not very sweet. Not as good as APL pie.

Weren’t the Fortune Cookies that you got when you logged off UNIX generated by C rather than FORTRAN? (The original Adventure game was in fact written in FORTRAN, though.)

I never learned FORTRAN. I had COBOL, Pascal and BASIC classes in college. I always wanted to learn SNOBOL (yes, that’s a real programming language).

The code in the cookies seems way too BASIC. Even though I’m an old lady of 77, I know about computer languages. I still remember how to program in Basic (from the days when computers had no OS).

I had problems with LISP, because I’m careless with parenthesis.

I think I’ll Assembler my thoughts, C to a cup of Java, and go play an RPG…

At Vandy (early 1970s) we had a modified version “Fortran Load and Go” that was a bit more forgiving than Fortran.

Learn something new every day here on Go Comics.

I don’t think eating those cookies would be a good idea, Pete.

Proper FORTRAN did indeed have a specific, punch-card-derived format, but many later versions (intended to be entered on terminals rather than card decks) were a bit more free-format. Still, what appears in the strip doesn’t look like the FORTRAN I remember from the early ’70s, when I was expected to use it to solve engineering problems.

By the way, another place where FORTRAN lives on is in the syntax for pretty much every scientific calculator out there (unless HP is still selling RPN calculators). Every now and then I get to sub a high-school physics class, and it makes me very nostalgic for my college days when I find the kids getting preposterous answers because they don’t understand operator precedence in FORTRAN mathematical expressions.

Lots of old programmers here today. I also learned Fortran on punch cards for an IBM 360. Then programmed in BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, and C. Fun days.

This made me laugh. I remember those punch cards. After their purpose was served, they weren’t even useful as scratch paper.

FWIW, FORTRAN is an acronym for “formula translation”

Heard of Fortran back in high school (class of ’82) along with COBOL, Pascal was a new language then. Programmed in Basic using Apple II computers and occasionally remotes using teletypes. One of my favorite basic programs:

10 print “I am a computer.”20 for a = 1 to 430 print “Nothing can go”40 for b = 1 to 350 print “wrong”60 next b70 next a80 end

Had no idea what it would do until we ran it. Hilarious on a teletype at 10 cps.

Fortran == FORmula TRANslation.

It’s gotta be better than a 4chan cookie.

Too many geeks here! It’s just Greek to me…

My first computer language was FORTRAN (yes, on punch cards). Wrote a limited battleship game (but as each “ship” was 1 square, it was really “guess 3 ordered pairs of numbers”). Good times. Long time ago.

FORTRAN like COBOL are computer programming languages from the 60’s and the 70’s, pretty much died out after ASCII

Ahhh..my very first programming language on our university’s IBM System/360 back in 1969.

I hated FORTRAN because every variable had to be formatted. :p

I couldn’t afford the HP 35 when it came out in ‘73 or ’74 (and anyway, I was pretty much done with the EE courses that required heavy number crunching, and into the CS courses that were all about logic), so I never bought one. Friend of mine found one of the programmable HP calculators at a garage sale a few years ago and gave it to me. Batteries had corroded and leaked, but those gold-plated contacts cleaned right up, and with a cordless-phone NiCd in place, it works just fine again (except for the card reader). I sometimes take it to the school when I teach physics, to loan to the kids who forgot their calculators. Or sometimes I take my slide rule—bought it in ’71, it still works and I’ve never had to put batteries in it!

Am I the only one who thinks Jason Fox reminds me of Sheldon Cooper?

FORmula TRANslator.

Classic pun. I remember programming in Fortran on punch cards in High school and early engineering school .

I’ll answer some of the questions and refute some of the incorrect statements. I have used Fortran for nearly 40 years. I still use it nearly every day.

Fortran is a computer programming language that was originally designed in 1954. It is still very much in use today. The latest version is Fortran 2008, which was approved by the ISO in 2010. The modern versions of Fortran (Fortran 90, 95, 2003, and 2008) have many features of modern programming languages. Fortran 2003 and 2008 are fully object-oriented. Fortran 2008 has built-in parallel processing.

By official ruling of the ISO, the name of the language is a proper noun, i.e., it is spelled “Fortran”, NOT “FORTRAN”.

The program examples that Jason Fox wrote ARE proper standard Fortran. Jason Fox used the free-format style that was introduced in Fortran 90. Fortran has had lower-case syntax as a standard feature since Fortran 2003.

No, you don’t need to use specific columns for input or output any more. Fortran has had free-form list-directed reads and writes since the days of FORTRAN 77. In fact, the “print” statements that Jason Fox is using use list-directed format.

“The wise coder uses comments.” But how do you comment with punch cards?

What is Fortran?I wonder…

I wrote Fortran programs back in the 1970s using punch cards. Back then, you wrote your comments on cards separate from the source code. Fortran did not have in-line comments in those days, just as it did not have free-format source form. Each card was a separate line of text, whether comment or source code.These days, of course, nobody uses punch cards. Modern editors and IDEs work just as well with modern Fortran as they do with other programming languages.

FORTRAN has changed a lot since I wrote in it.

What’s FORTRAN?