God is real unless declared integer,
Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07
Kristian Köhntopp commended:
GOD IS REAL UNLESS DECLARED INTEGER..
In some versions of Fortran, the default type of variables starting with I, J, K or L is integer, while other varianles are by default typed as real. The Fortran statement DECLARE can be used to explicitly declare a variables as being of a specific type.
The variable GOD stats with G and hence is implicitly real, unless you add an appropriate declare statement.
He reminded my of my FORTRAN 66 days at university when studying “computer usage for chemists”:
I remember a “computer usage for chemists” course during my studies where (end of the 1980s!) were supposed to program in FORTRAN 66.
Luckily the VAX/VMS machine supported a much more recent FORTRAN version and had support for 132 columns as well, which allowed me to indent properly (like I was used from my Pascal background).This tremendously helped me solve basically this problem:
- import tables with
- atom code, radius and valence (bonding count)
- atom1 code, atom2 code, minimum distance, maximum distance
- atom code, X/Y/Z coordinate
- determine which bonds can occur
- walk the bonds and determine the atomic structure, including cycle count
Especially the last one was easiest to solve with recursion, which FORTRAN does not support. So I wrote my own stack structure and solved the problem.
The student coach was mad when she found out I had printed the full documentation on continuous form paper which took the printer about half an hour for printing the ~100 pages.
Next morning, I had read it front-to-back and colour-indexed all the sections so it was far easier to find what the compiler could do for me. She could not believe I had done that.
All my co students were on a (non shielded!) 300 meter multiplexed serial connection with VT-120 emulators from PC’s with all sorts of connection problems.
I discovered a small room right above the VAX/VMS machine having a couple of terminals with direct connections that were hardly used. A few of them were VT-240 that had a session switch allowing for maximum 3 interactive sessions running at far higher priority than the compiler/linker batch queues provided.
This allowed me to perform quick release cycles of my project: 1 session for editing and inspecting logs, 1 session for compiling my last version, 1 session for linking the previously compiled version.
I was about the only student that delivered the project on time (:
Via: Archive.is Check out @chicaScientific’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/chicaScientific/statu… having
“Why did the integer drown?”
“Because he wasn’t a float”
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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