Had To Use Fortran

I had to write some Fortran 77 once, but I found it extremely difficult to even get the right indentation. So I used Ratfor. (For the unenlightened, Ratfor is a preprocessor for FortranLanguage that allows you to write Fortran in a more C-like syntax.) It cost quite some time to find a Ratfor preprocessor. Apparently Ratfor is "only of historical importance". Well, I agree that in an ideal world, Ratfor would be obsolete, but in an ideal world, Fortran 77 would be obsolete, too. Or not even invented in the first place.

Reply: The right indentation? The 'indentation' rules are trivial. As I recall, Fortran 77 tried to plug a hole in previous versions of Fortran, by providing a new type of variable to hold characters. This was supposed to be a significant improvement. It was, in a sense, but once you start down that road, you soon want much more. Ratfor brought comfort to those wanting improved structure, but it stopped there, and so gradually became obscure. What Fortran needed, but never got, was a complete overhaul.

Ditto on the trivial indentation rules. There are probably still neurons in my brain wired to hit the space-bar six times before starting a typical FORTRAN line - GeoffSobering

CategoryFortran