# Fortran

For a programming language with a half-century legacy, FORTRAN not surprisingly has accumulated its share of jokes and folklore.

## Quotes

* As I said in my comments to the committee, [Fortran 90' would be a] nice language, too bad it's not Fortran.
** Dan Davison - http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/88q4/11267.7.html
** Also commonly applied to other such evolutions of programming languages. E.g: "Perl 6 would be a nice language, but it's not going to be Perl."
* FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
** Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866.
* In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
** Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975) EWD498. Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.
* FORTRAN—the "infantile disorder"—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
** Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?". 1975-06-18. Retrieved on 2008-08-20.
* Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…
** Hoare, C. A. R.. Hints on Programming Language Design. in Sigact/Sigplan Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. October 1973. , reprinted in Horowitz. Programming Languages, A Grand Tour, 3rd ed.
** This is an example of computer folklore incorrectly attributing the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a syntax error in a Fortran program. See Risks Digest: Mariner 1, Vol. 9: Iss. 54, 12 Dec 89 (and Risks Digest: "Mariner I -- no holds BARred", Vol. 8: Iss. 75) for what really happened.
* The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.
** Ed Post, Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, 1982.
* People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange surroundings — they can become accustomed to read Lisp and Fortran programs, for example.
** Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, The Art of PROLOG, MIT Press.
* FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
** Ken Thompson, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

## Attributed

* 95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
** Ken Thompson, circa 2005; attributed by Lohr, Steve (2007-03-19). "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies". Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
* Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
** Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual.
* Warning: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
** Easter egg in the SDS/Xerox Sigma 7 FORTRAN compiler, when the statement GO TO JAIL was encountered. The message refers to the "Chance" card in the board game, Monopoly.
* "A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." — a fortune cookie from the Unix program fortune.

## Misquoted

* The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
    Although this quote appears in different sources, the real manual does not mention the possibility of changing pi. The real quote is
    The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants. For example, instead of referring to $\pi$ as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, if a more accurate value is required.
   * Xerox Basic FORTRAN and Basic FORTRAN IV Manual, p. 19, attributed to David H. Owens.

## External links

* ↑ Durkee, John (2006-07-21) (in en). Management of Industrial Cleaning Technology and Processes. Elsevier. p. 251. ISBN 9780080464855.
* ↑ DATA statements... [rec.humor.funny]. www.netfunny.com.