OT: Language for the ages

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: OT:  Language for the ages
>   From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com>
>   Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:37:39 -0700 (PDT)
>     To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>
>> 
>> > Are there any schools teaching FORTRAN and more? Does it
>> >have an active community? If not, ...
>> 
>> Amazingly*, Yes.
>> I go visit my old college bookstore every few years for fresh titles
>> in Computer Science (this year: I bought O/S internals by Stallings).
>> It's a top 25 undergraduate engineering ranked place with a big 
>> budget for new equipment so I was quite surprised to see this year
>> the book "Classical Fortran" by Kupferschmid.  In my head I'm thinking
>> Fortran is Only for classiccmps and classiccmps are Retired equipment.
>> Apparently this course is for maintenence programmers.
>> 
>> John A.
>> * to me, for one.
>> 
>
>Fortran seems to still be the favorite language for number crunching.
>
>	Zane

That is the forte' of Fortran.  However user interfaces in fortran are sparse
as the language is not well suited to textual data.

I feel there is no one language for all tasks.  For example older 8080/z80
hardware was likely programmed in ASM for embedded apps due to size constraints
of availabe ROMs.  However I've seen a lot of stuff with basic in ROM and the 
programming in BASIC so the hardware could be somewhat self supporting.

It would seem that languages that persist are those best able to cope with
large changes in computing environments.  Fortran and BASIC are old and well 
known as are Pascal and C and likely a few others.  The rest are dialects or
specializations that live in specific application environments.  When those 
environments become passe` or surperceeded the languages will either evolve 
or become "old".

Allison