[TUHS] [COFF] Fwd: Old and Tradition was V9 shell

[Adam Thornton]

"I'd go to the local University that teaches Fortran and ask around."

Aye, there's the rub.

SIUE (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville) still had a COBOL
curriculum a decade ago, and they might still.  They were fairly forthright
in training people to go work at a lot of the stodgier St. Louis
enterprises that still had a large COBOL footprint (AB, Enterprise
Rent-A-Car, Caterpillar, et al).  By 2010, though, Express Scripts was
trying hard to move away from its ANCHOR (COBOL) system and
whatever-it-was-they-had running on VMS, and it sure felt like in the early
2010s STL was mostly Java EE.

I would think that FORTRAN is likelier to be passed around as folk wisdom
and ancient PIs (uh, Primary Investigators, not the detective kind)
thrusting a dog-eared FORTRAN IV manual at their new grad students and
snarling "RTFM!" than as actual college courses.

That said, if you want to learn FORTRAN and don't mind working from modern
FORTRAN back, I really was impressed by https://lfortran.org/ , and the
ability to run it in a JupyterLab playground environment is fantastic for
quick-turnaround experimentation.  Plus Ondřej Čertík
<https://ondrejcertik.com/> was fun to talk to and hang out with.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:40:10AM +0100, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote:
> > Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > > Fortran programmers are formally trained (at least I
> > > was, there was a whole semester devoted to this) in accumulated errors.
> > > You did a deep dive into how to code stuff so that the error was
> reduced
> > > each time instead of increased.  It has a lot to do with how floating
> > > point works, it's not exact like integers are.
> >
> > I was unaware that there's formal training to be had around this but
> > it's something I'd like to learn more about. Any recommendations on
> > materials? I don't mind diving into Fortran itself either.
>
> My training was 35 years ago, I have no idea where to go look for this
> stuff now.  I googled and didn't find much.  I'd go to the local
> University that teaches Fortran and ask around.
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