21 Mar
2018
21 Mar
'18
2:27 a.m.
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 3/20/18, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
wrote:
With care, and the right additional pseudo-primitives, you can do quite
interesting systems-programming-like things in Fortran. But they are
usually a variation on RATFOR and often involve more pain than would
otherwise have been needed, but it's possible. I once did some low-level
systems stuff in FORTRAN-66 that lived under a psuedo Fortran 77
pre-processor that had some CPP-like macro features....
And I will never, ever, do it again :). I might do Turbo-PASCAL again, but
no system's programming in Fortran.
Warner
Having worked on system programming for UNIX and
a few of the PDP-11 DEC
OS’s (DOS, RT, RSX, and in passing RSTS), I can tell you Fortran was
abhorrent.
Yes, Fortran is as awful for system programming as C is for numeric
programming that involves throwing multidimensional arrays around.
Screwdrivers always make bad hammers.