Fortran - Re: Why these original FORTRAN quirks?

Author

Re: Why these original FORTRAN quirks?

Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj

2006-10-30, 7:15 pm

Richard Maine wrote:

> glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@seniti.ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> That's my philosophy also. I figure that context helps a little more
> with understanding variable names. Plus variable names are likely to be
> used multiple times in a statement or in a group of statements, making
> long ones more awkward.
>
> But for procedure names, I want the name to give enough clue that I
> don't need to go looking up the docs or source code in some other file.
> And a procedure is likely to be referenced only once in a group of
> statements. So my procedure names tend to be a little longer than my
> variable names. I still don't go for ridiculously long - I've never felt
> in the least bit constrained by the f90/95 31-character limit; I could
> mostly do just fine in 15, though I don't use that as a hard limit.
>
In many cases, systems, external names are more limited in length.

Anne & Lynn Wheeler

2006-10-30, 7:16 pm

Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.Invalid> writes:
> I don't think I could justify SAS for home, and companies and staff
> often have to get by with what's made available; only those with a
> larger machine heritage seem to have expensive products like SAS,
> because they kept the software around when they downsized machines.

recent post about using multiple regression analysis to identify a
significant performance improvement (large financial application that
ran for hours on large number of fully decked out mainframes)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006s.html#24 Curiousity: CPU % for COBOL program

I was using a free package off the web that had various limits on the
number of variables that it could handle ... which would have been
pretty much eliminated using SAS.

the original reference to performance analysis work in the early and
mid-70s at the science center
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech

that eventually evolved into things like capacity planning
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#bench

had used multiple regression analysis from the fortran scientific
subroutine library. i have some vague memory that when the scientific
subroutine library was discontinued ... all of that stuff was possibly
picked up by SAS.

the other language that was used extensively in that period was APL
.... including significant amount of performance and system modeling.
One such (APL) application from the science center eventually evolved into
the "performance predictor" available on the internal HONE system
providing worldwide support to field, sales, and marketing people
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

customer profile information could be input (workload, configuration,
performance, etc) and "what-if" questions could be asked regarding
what happens if there were changes in workload and/or configuration.

in the 70s and 80s there was quite a bit of use of APL for modeling
and "what-if" scenarios ... a lot of which subsequently migrated to
various spreadsheet technologies.

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