Brilliant ingenuity!
I started on Fortran, Algol 60 and COBOL but only liked Algol and went on to love Pascal obviously.
All our previous work with older products and technologies does put us in a much better situation to analyse and overcome deficiencies in newer software... specifically the memory hungry ones around at present.
Dave
-----Original Message----- From: ProFox [mailto:profox-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Jean MAURICE Sent: 31 August 2017 15:39 To: profox@leafe.com Subject: [OT] Re: [FW] Programming language life expectancy
These last few days, I am smiling when I read Profox : I thought I was the only 'Foxil' still working with Foxpro DOS (I have an app working on a Compaq PC that is 23 years old !) and I am an 'expert' of FORTRAN : when I was in university it was one the few languages available (with COBOL and a little later C).
I still work with FORTRAN : one of my client is EDF (French national Electricity Delivery). They where building simulations with 'R' (A new language easy to use but .... slow). As a test, I translate one of them to FORTRAN : running time went from 20 minutes to less than 3 seconds (on a multicore machine with FORTRAN MPI). Since then, I translate a lot and they began to build large simulations (one hour of FORTRAN !).
I have two drawbacks : - I can't 'teach' the new scientists that working with integer is a lot quicker than working with real numbers - the FORTRAN exe run in a 'dos window' within Windows XP and I have no access to the energy saver parameters. So, after 15 minutes, the PC goes to stand by mode because Windows is not able to detect that a 'DOS' exe is running. So I bought a 'rotating fan', fixed the mouse on it so it moves continously right and left and ... windows stay 'alive' !!
The Foxil
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