14 Mar
2020
14 Mar
'20
5:30 p.m.
Doug McIlroy [14.03.2020 00:31]:
struct
Brenda Baker undertook her Fortan-to-Ratfor converter against the advice
of her department head--me. I thought it would likely produce an ad hoc
reordering of the orginal, freed of statement numbers, but otherwise no
more readable than a properly indented Fortran program. Brenda proved
me wrong. She discovered that every Fortran program has a canonically
structured form. Programmers preferred the canonicalized form to what
they had originally written.
I've been trying to find the source to this. I have lots of old
spaghetti-Fortran routines from a former job, and I would love to try
making it somewhat understandable.
--
Hilsen Harald