Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C

[abdul shammaa]

> Then there's that function I encountered whilst working for an
> unnamed defense contractor.  It seems the person had no prior
> experience with C.  Came back with a single function that had
> 263 (two hundred sixty three) GOTO's in it.  I don't even know
> how many lines the function itself was but these gotos were coming
> about every other line.  Good thing the function worked--I didn't
> have to touch the code.
> 
> Funny thing was, they told me the program was object oriented when
> I came to this new group.  I didn't know OOP meant so many goto's...:-)
> -- 
> Michael Sullivan...
>

How do you convince your managment that it's time to throw away the
ancient FORTRAN 4 when there are thousands and thousands of lines of that
crap :-( ?! To make matters worse, most to the developers are those who
fear "C" or just don't want to change.  I am getting sick and tired of
looking at variable names that look like: I1, I2, KK, IKK, RR etc.. and
at GOTO statments that you have to use in FORTRAN 4.  You may be asking
why FORTRAN 4? Well, because as the upper managment puts it "Our software
has to run on so many hardware platforms".  That's true, BUT, I don't
believe that that reason should keep up in the middle ages of software
technology.

You can't believe the pains that you have to go through just to allocate
dynamic memory...(YUK!).  Mind you these are CAE applications which are
complex by nature.  So one need not the added burden and limitations of
the programming language itself.

May be changing to "C", "C++", or any other civilized programming language
is impossible at this stage of the game.  Or, is it?  What do you think?

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