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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

It took 30 minutes to cure you?!?

One of the first things I did when I got my PiDP-11 which can run RSX-11M and the DEC fortran compiler. I spent many many hours programming in Fortran when I was in college and thought wow I could relive some of that, about 5 minutes in I was "okay, step slowly away from the console." :-)

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There's a fun stream where tsoding decides to learn Fortran, and the instructions he's working from say to turn off implicit typing (ie write "implicit none"). He's familiar with modern languages with type inference and with C++ type deduction which is a similar idea to full blown inference - and so he has no reason to even guess what Fortran is going to do without that admonition and you can see he's not happy when he finds out.

I don't get that at all. Old FORTRAN has a mildly confusing feature that is easy to disable. He then got upset about the mildly confusing feature that everybody now disables. If one wants to bitch about Fortran, at least complain about the modern language (which is still a horror show of poorly defined and often unportable features), not the stuff that has been made obsolete.

I was teaching one of the local highschool kids how to program in C and they asked "So why does everybody use i,j, and k for their indexes in loops?"

I only use 'j' and 'k', not 'i ' -- the rarely-used letters are easier to search for.

ii is also good.

i stands for index. j and k because we can't use i anymore, and maybe because they are close together on the keyboard

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