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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Fortran’ Category

Is Fortran better than Python for teaching the basics of numerical linear algebra? – Dr. Jean-Christophe Loiseau

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/13

The summary of [Wayback/Archive] Is Fortran better than Python for teaching the basics of numerical linear algebra? – Dr. Jean-Christophe Loiseau is:

  1. 1-based indexing prevents off-by-1 errors
  2. structure is key, especially these foundations:
    • clear begin/end constructs instead of visual clues
    • strong typing
  3. verbose programming languages are easier to learn than non-verbose ones

Modern Fortran helps a lot here and shows that after the initial 13 year gaps between FORTRAN 77 and Fortran 90, and between Fortran 90 and Fortran 2003 (the ANSI Standard Fortran and Fortran 95 in between versions were just minor updates), Modern Fortran has come a very long way and now as a thriving community and an extensive list of Fortran software and tools.

Other typed languages and tool sets like C# and Delphi come to mind here as well though you need libraries with 1-based data structures to solve the first point.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fortran, Learning/Teaching, LifeHacker, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

I still print (relevant parts of) code. Have been for a long time. Will keep doing it.

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/02/24

In a response to [WayBack] Iris Classon on Twitter: “I’m curious, how many of you guys and gals have printed out code on paper to read later? Doing it during earlier years also counts 🤓”, I started the long read below starting with [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “Still do.… “.

Basically a more in depth coverage of my 2017 post Happy 60th birthday, Fortran.

[WayBack] Thread by @jpluimers: “@IrisClasson Still do. @IrisClasson There is a story behind these 1988 tractor feed print outs, which follows shortly. I should put dinosaur […]”

Still do.

There is a story behind these 1988 tractor feed print outs, which follows shortly.

I should put dinosaur or old-fart on my job description.

CC @isotopp

The story has to do with this.
A “translation” of [WayBack] Programming Fortran 77: A Structured Approach (ISBN-10: 0835956717) but I wish I had had the original back then, as in fact it was a knock off, mostly covering FORTRAN IV and 66.

Sidestory: these books were from the same era.

Machine learning and AI modern?

They are about as modern as AWK. Both still relevant though.

AWK is indispensable on many *n*x related systems, especially the low powered one. The book is still the ultimate source on it; see [WayBack] stackoverflow.com/a/703174/29290

text processing – Is there still any reason to learn AWK? – Stack Overflow

If you quickly learn the basics of awk, you can indeed do amazing things on the command line.

But the real reason to learn awk is to have an excuse to read the superb book The AWK Programming Language by its authors Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. You would think, from the name, that it simply teaches you awk. Actually, that is just the beginning. Launching into the vast array of problems that can be tackled once one is using a concise scripting language that makes string manipulation easy — and awk was one of the first — it proceeds to teach the reader how to implement a database, a parser, an interpreter, and (if memory serves me) a compiler for a small project-specific computer language! If only they had also programmed an example operating system using awk, the book would have been a fairly complete survey introduction to computer science!

Famously clear and concise, like the original C Language book, it also is a wonderful example of friendly technical writing done right. Even the index is a piece of craftsmanship.

Awk? If you know it, you’ll use it at the command-line occasionally, but for anything larger you’ll feel trapped, unable to access the wider features of your system and the Internet that something like Python provides access to. But the book? You’ll always be glad you read it!

 

Brandon Rhodes
Back to the story. With some side-steps to (:

Here we go…

This is end 1980s. I was a student. A year later I started my own consultancy as a side-thing.

The reason is that I had a client prospect for some PC Turbo Pascal programming. So I needed to buy some hardware. Only companies could buy hardware. So I started one.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

2 years later, I was selling PC network hardware to a university research group, so they could connect to the internet. At 75% of what they would pay via their regular channels. My profit was large enough to cover for that year of studying.

Back to the print-outs.

They were on tractor-feed paper en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery
We had a class: computer usage for chemistry students. It was mandatory. They were teaching from a FORTRAN 77 book that was in fact more FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 66. Found a link to it too: [WayBack] Cursus Fortran 77, R.C. Holt, J.N.P. Hume
There were huge differences between these FORTRAN versions:

The way you would program in that class was via PC terminals with serial terminal emulation, connected to a VAX 11/780 machine running VAX/VMS 4.7.

The connection was through a multiplexed serial over an unshielded ribbon cable some 300 yards long.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_cable

The connection was very reliable: about 90% of the characters would transmit correctly.

So I had to reset the VT52 terminal emulation over the Kermit protocol every minute or so, then wait a dozen seconds for the screen to re-draw.

At the chemistry department it was still a VAX 11/780 machine called HLERUL5, but at the computing department they had an 11/750 called RULCRI which was faster.

They also had a bunch of VT100 terminals that could do 132-columns instead of 80, with a far more reliable connection.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100

Later the chemistry department also got their own VAX 11/750, renamed the old one to HLERUL52 for the 2nd years studens to to work on, and kept the old HLERUL5 name.

The machines were networked too, so you could connect to one, then daisy-chain your logon to the others.

Long story short: later I managed to get official accounts on both chemistry department machines, and borrow an account on the computing department one. So I had accounts on HLERUL5, HLERUL52 and access to RULCRI when needed.
Later too, I found out that the room above the VAX 11/780 also had VT100 terminals (later even two VT240 terminals!). It wasn’t meant for student use though. But with some social engineering…

In the mean time, I wanted to make better use of the VAX/VMS FORTRAN compiler.

Apart from that it fully supported FORTRAN 77, it also had many more language features and had support for 132 columns instead of just 80.

Given FORTRAN had limited use of the leftmost 8 columns, having 124 usable columns instead of just 72 made a huge difference in readability.
There was no book in the library on VAX/VMS FORTRAN, but the on-line help was great: both vast and in-depth. With the bad serial documentation though, it was very hard to read on-line.

The easiest way to read things was on paper. I think the printer back then was a LA36 DecWriter II or LA120 DecWriter III

www.youtube.com/embed/T3TifjAX51I
www.youtube.com/embed/tJ1jkINFVho
www.youtube.com/embed/T3TifjAX51I

Printing one topic at a time however was cumbersome. Print jobs were not always printed in the right order, and sending like a 100 print commands that all were slightly different was hard too.
Luckily I found out two things:
  1. you could dump the output of a FORTRAN HELP page to a file
  2. you could recursively generate all FORTRAN HELP, then redirect that to a file
The recursion was great, as it would output everything in an orderly fashion. What was lacking though is a good table of contents. More on that in a bit.
So I decided to send that file to the printer. Of course I knew that would take something like an hour, so I printed it during lunch time.
I was back from lunch early to monitor the printing progress (VAX/VMS had queues for everything, and you could monitor the ones or the parts of ones you had access to!).

The printer was right next to the VAX 11/780 and both of them were very noisy. The climate control was even noisier, which meant you wanted to avoid that room whenever possible.

So shortly after my job was ready, I wanted to pick it up and make the 300 meter walk twice.

Right at that moment, the student assistent walked in with a red face, madly screaming “who the hell printed this one inch stack of FORTRAN help”.
I responded that I did. At first she (this was a time when we had a way better balanced female/male ratio in STEM) would not even want to give my output, refusing to believe I would read it.
She also would not believe that you cour recursively send the help to a file, then print it. But the stack of paper demonstrated otherwise.
I explained that I was going to read the whole stack. It took a long weekend, as after reading, I manually made the hand written table of contents on the front.
In addition, I colour marked the sides of the paper matching the entries in the table of contents.

Now I could index into the right topics very quickly.

She was amazed I did all that in just a weekend. Apparently, that’s how my brain copes with information: need something, read something, read something, use something.

Later she actually made use of that stack of paper, as it was a great way for other people too to figure out some things faster than doing it on-line.
Back to my side-business: that’s the reason for the PASCAL stack of paper. It’s the output of the VAX/VMS help for the PASCAL compiler. It was great and helped me learn a lot on the language.

That print job took far less time: it was printed from RULCRI to the printer at the computing department. Their printer was not a dot-matrix one, line printer. It was orders of magnitude faster.

3 years later, I started doing more and more work with Turbo Pacscal and made the business my full time work.

Only a decade later, I found out why I had deverted less and less energy into my studies and more into work.

Two reasons: computers are way easier to cope with than people, and a theoretical university was totally the wrong kind of environment for my learning mode: I am an auto-didactic person. I need to do things in order to learn.
By now I have slowly learned way and way more about people. Coping with them is still tough, taking a lot of energy. But by now it is also a lot of fun. Though doing both at the same time is still very very hard for me.

Finally back to the STRUCT print job:

That was actually the FORTRAN program I developed for the assignment.

You could choose from multiple problems to solve during the assignment.

As one of the few students, I managed to finish it in-time.

I was the only one that took this particular problem.

The essence is that you got a few tables with data:

  • atom numbers, atom abbreviation and atom covalence (the number of other atoms they can bond with)
  • bond pairs with abbreviations and minimum/maximum distance
  • atom locations (abbreviation plus X/Y/Z coordinate)
The goal was to find which atoms were connected, and describe any cycles.

Only after reading the tables, then trying to solve the problem, I found out a recursive solution was needed to solve it.

Boy was I surprised that FORTRAN did not support recursion.

In the end, I implemented my own recursion with stacks citing a Dire Straits song with “and when you finally reappear, at the place where you came in…”.

A long story to explain I started printing on things to read very early on (:

/end

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Algorithms, Development, Fortran, Power User, Printers, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

gdbgui – browser based debugger for C, C++, go, rust, Fortran. Modern gdb frontend.

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/03/05

[WayBack] gdbgui – browser based debugger for C, C++, go, rust, Fortran. Modern gdb frontend.: gdbgui (gnu debugger graphical user interface)

Via: [WayBack] Browser-based debugger for C, C++, go, rust, and more – written in Python with Flask. https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui Easy installation via PyPI: pip i… – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in C, C++, Debugging, Development, Fortran, GDB, Go (golang), Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/07

Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of indirection atop assembly. Alas, the popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable. I’ve gone through some common features that probably should’ve stayed in C and my justification for saying so. The features are listed in rough order from (I hope) least to most controversial. The idea is that C fans will give up when I call it “weakly typed” and not even get to the part where I rag on braces. Wait, crap, I gave it away.

Great re-read towards the end of the year: [WayBack] Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad

Via: [WayBack] Old and busted: emacs vs vi. New and hot: Language war, everybody against everybody else. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, APL, Awk, bash, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CoffeeScript, CommandLine, D, Delphi, Development, F#, Fortran, Go (golang), Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PowerShell, Python, Ruby, Scala, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, VB.NET, VBScript | 3 Comments »

Happy 60th birthday, Fortran

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/15

I remember a FORTRAN IV (or was it 66?) course during my chemistry studies at the end of the 1980s. Luckily, the VAX/VMS version (not sure which one, it ran on a VAX 11/750) where we had to program on came with an extended FORTRAN 77 compiler even supporting 132 columns and other nice features.

My favourite program was about an algorithm to assemble 3 tables (one relating atom numbers and their valencies, a second with atom-atom distances, a third with 3-D atom positions) into a chemical compound indicating any rings. I implemented my own recursion with stacks citing a Dire Straits song with “and when you finally reappear, at the place where you came in…”.

Later I ported this to a PC reviewing the Microsoft FORTRAN 5.1 compiler for the Dutch PCM (Personal Computer Magazine). Recently I learned Lahey had a big role in the Fortran.NET compiler.

This year FORTRAN turned 60 years old and it is still in used, though not as heavily as a few decades ago.

The Fortran compiler, introduced in April 1957, was the first optimizing compiler, and it paved the way for many technical computing applications over the years. What Cobol did for business computing, Fortran did for scientific computing. Fortran may be approaching retirement age, but that doesn’t mean it’s about to stop working. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the first Fortran (then styled “FORTRAN,” for “FORmula TRANslation”) release.

Source: [WayBack] Happy 60th birthday, Fortran.

Via [Archive.is] Happy 60th birthday, Fortran – ThisIsWhyICode – Google+

Historic references:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Fortran, Software Development | 1 Comment »

RosettaCode: cool way to improve your coding skills

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/01/22

Wow: I feel like having lived under a stone for 8 years, as RosettaCode has been alive since it was founded in 2007 by Mike Mol.

The idea is that you solve a task and learn from that, or learn by seeing how others have solved tasks or draft tasks.

So in a sense it is similar to the Rosetta stone: it has different languages phrasing the same tasks.

There are already a whole bunch of languages on RosettaCode (of which a few are in the categories below), and you can even suggest or add your own languages.

When you want to solve tasks, be sure to look at the list unimplemented tasks by language that leads to automatic reports by language (for instance two of the languages I use most often: C# and Delphi).

I’m sure there are lots of programming chrestomathy sites, even beyond the ones, and it feels very similar to programming kata sites.

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, APL, Awk, bash, Batch-Files, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, Fortran, FreePascal, Java, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Lazarus, Object Pascal, Office VBA, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PowerShell, Prism, Scripting, sed script, Sh Shell, Software Development, Turbo Prolog, VB.NET, VBS, VBScript, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Time for a golden oldie: Pragmatic Software Development Tips

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/09

From the century start era of The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The Pragmatic Programmer, a – still valid – list of Pragmatic Software Development Tips.

From Care About Your Craft, via DRY, Some Things Are Better Done than Described, Keep Knowledge in Plain Text, Work With a User to Think Like a User, Find the Box, and many others till Sign Your Work.

–jeroen

via: The Pragmatic Bookshelf | List of Tips.

Posted in .NET, C++, Cloud Development, COBOL, CommandLine, Delphi, Development, Fortran, iSeries, Java, Pascal, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 3 Comments »

Delphi/Fortran memory allocation difference: row/column major order makes a big difference. StackOverflow answer.

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/14

Last week I posted an in depth answer on StackOverflow.com about the memory allocation difference in Delphi and Fortran, or more accurately in two different kinds of languages.

You have:

  • column major order (not only used in Fortran and other science centric languages, but also in the shading languages GLSL and HLSL that can be used in FireMonkey)
  • row major order (used in most other languages, for instance Delphi, C, etc)

A very important aspect is the order of for optimized loops. For column major order, the optimum is inside out (as the inner arrays/records are in consecutive memory locations), but for row major order, it is the exact inverse.

One of the consequences is that in Fortran it is a very fast operation to pass an array of inner fields as parameter to a method.

This is what I wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi for PHP, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Development, Fortran, Software Development | 4 Comments »