From ANDREW WALKER
Michael Metcalf (‘Still programming after all these years’, 12 September)
presents the usual Fortran version of history. In fact, Algol was not discarded
because of the complexity of its grammar, for in reality it is simpler than
Fortran, Pascal, C and PL/1, among others. It lost out to Pascal for marketing
and PR reasons, just as Pascal later lost out (mostly) to C for technical
reasons.
Metcalf reports that Fortran is at last becoming ‘safer’. This is good
news, but I suggest that more than the language needs to change. Fortran
has traditionally banned many unsafe practices, but has left it to the programmer
to ensure that the bans are enforced. This is good for ‘efficiency’, in
that the compiler does not need to insert costly checks into the code. But
it is a sure recipe for bugs and obscure mishaps of the sort that occasionally
lead to spectacular disasters.
Those Fortran programmers (I hope a minority) who are obsessed beyond
reason with efficiency need to move to the mind-set common among users of
many other languages. In this mind-set, the odd percentage point of speed
is sacrificed to rigorous checking, and nits picked by the compiler are
gladly accepted as preferable to portability problems and other bugs, which
are much more easily cured at the outset than when they become visible in
a running system.
Andrew Walker University of Nottingham
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