On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/20/18, Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 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.

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