Post #2398421
2026-05-08 17:05 UTC
Replies (1)
-
@arclight@oldbytes.space 2026-05-15 12:35
@TheJen@beige.party @nxskok@cupoftea.social @Guillotine_Jones@beige.party OMG, that sounds like a disaster! Not the FORTRAN part - it's a small low-magic language, easy to reason about. It's absolutely the wrong language for accounting because it has no currency or fixed-point data types. Floats are notoriously bad for the very specific currency rounding rules. At the time it probably made sense. COBOL's mathematical notation is hideous so if you're doing weird things with interest or depreciation, it's much easier verifying the code matches the specification. Plus it's a convenient excuse to teach people FORTRAN. So much code got written in FORTRAN that really should've been done in a different language but you could tell it was the best language the authors had access to or familiarity with. A few years ago I modernized a late-70s adventure game from F66 to F2018 and while Modern Fortran has a workable OO model, it's still pretty bad at text processing and still has no standard library. At least now the structure of the game is apparent and it's in a better position to be ported to a more appropriate language. https://gitlab.com/apthorpe/Castlequest