Why just a few weeks ago, while translating an algorithm description in text (1 based indices) to Python, I screwed up the indices in arrays I was building by hand. A few A[1,1] that should have been A[0,0].
One of the corner cases, though, is where mathematics uses 0 indices is in polynomials and series expansions, where the index matches the exponent of X.. sum of [ A[i] * x^i/factorial(i)] kinds of things From: Jim Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 1:13 AM To: John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com> Cc: Jim Lux <james.p....@jpl.nasa.gov>, "beowulf@beowulf.org" <beowulf@beowulf.org> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place Indexing from zero - who ever heard of zero of a thing. Damn quiche eaters. Note that by default arrays are also indexed from 1 in Julia… I wonder who they're trying to attract :-) There are also people working on interactive Fortran in “notebook”s (e.g. https://lfortran.org/<https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/lfortran.org/__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!c-aWiyODjwSo50dW5Q3cXH2mJBhypLMygw4UBq3lyyG660U51JMSiQvtxpJnoSqRrX3tgBA$> ) On 20 Oct 2020, at 09:00, John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com<mailto:hear...@gmail.com>> wrote: > Most compilers had extensions from the IV/66 (or 77) – quoted strings, for > instance, instead of Hollerith constants, and free form input. Some allowed > array index origins other than 1 I can now date exactly when the rot set in. Hollerith constants are good enough for anyone. It's a gosh darned computer, not your nearest and dearest whispering in your ear. It still thinks it is talking to a thundering line printer and getting its input from a real Teletype. Indexing from zero - who ever heard of zero of a thing. Damn quiche eaters. On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 22:27, Lux, Jim (US 7140) via Beowulf <beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>> wrote: Yes, the evil-ution of languages proceeded at a much more stately pace in “arpanet” days. Typically, you’d have a bunch of vendor specific versions, and since PCs per-se didn’t exist, you bought the compiler for the machine you had. And then, maybe you paid attention to the notes in the back of the manual about deviations from the Fortran IV, 66, or 77. Most compilers had extensions from the IV/66 (or 77) – quoted strings, for instance, instead of Hollerith constants, and free form input. Some allowed array index origins other than 1 (handy for FFTs where you wanted to go from -N/2 to N/2). Most also had some provision for direct access to files, as opposed to sequential, but it was very, very OS dependent. Probably by the 80s and early 90s, with widespread use of personal computers, and the POSIX standard, you started to see more “machine independent, standards compliant” Fortran. And, you saw the idea of buying your compiler from someone different than the computer maker, i.e. companies like Absoft and Portland Group (now part of nvidia), partly because the microcomputer manufacturers had no interest in developing compilers for cheap processors, and sometimes to accommodate a specialized need. Hence products like Fortran for 8080 under CP/M from Digital Research. ( I ran Cromemco Fortran IV in 48k of RAM on my mighty Cromemco Z80 at 4MHz, which I believe was a variant of Fortran-80 from DR) But even then, it was a pretty slow evolution – the Fortran compilers I was running in the 80s on microcomputers under MS-DOS wasn’t materially different from the Fortran I was running in 1978 on a Z80, which wasn’t significantly different from the Fortran I ran on mainframes (IBM 360, CDC 6xxx, etc.) and minis (IBM 1130, PDP-11 in the 60s and 70s. What would change is things like the libraries available to do “non-standard” stuff (like random disk access). From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org>> on behalf of "beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>" <beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>> Reply-To: Prentice Bisbal <pbis...@pppl.gov<mailto:pbis...@pppl.gov>> Date: Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:21 PM To: "Renfro, Michael" <ren...@tntech.edu<mailto:ren...@tntech.edu>>, "beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>" <beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place That's exactly what I suspected. I guess 13 years is like an eternity in the modern "Speed of the Internet" world we live in, but may not have been such a slow evolution time of the pre-Internet days. Prentice On 10/19/20 2:53 PM, Renfro, Michael wrote: Minor point of pedagogy from my place in the "learned FORTRAN 77 in 1990" crowd: your instructor's options would have been: * standard FORTRAN 77 * vendor-specific dialect of FORTRAN (VAX or otherwise) * maybe a pre-release of FORTRAN 90? Wasn't released and standardized until 1991-92. Never mind the availability of texts for same. From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org><mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org> Date: Monday, October 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM To: beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org> <beowulf@beowulf.org><mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place On 10/19/20 10:28 AM, Douglas Eadline wrote: > --snip-- > >> Unfortunately the presumption seems to be that the old is deficient >> because it is old, and "my generation†didn't invent it (which is >> clearly perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, … which are >> all older than any of our programming languages, and which adapt, as do >> our programming languages). >> > I think this has a lot to do with the Fortran situation. In these "modern" > times, software seems to have gone from "releases" to a "sliding > constant release" cycle and anything not released in the past few > months is "old." > > How many people here will wait a 2-6 months before installing > a "new version" of some package in production to make sure there > are no major issues. And of course keep older version options > with software modules. Perhaps because I've been at this a while, > I have a let it "mellow a bit" approach to shinny new software. > > I find it odd that Fortran gets placed in the "old software box" > because it works while new languages with their constant feature > churn and versions break dependency trees all over the place, > and somehow that is good thing. Now get off my lawn. > > -- > Doug > Now we're starting to veer of course a little here, but what the hell... I think that one of the problems with Fortran is a complete misunderstanding of it's purpose. People are always shocked when I tell them the scientists I support are "still" using Fortran. Many people think that C and C++ replaced Fortran, but that is not true. C was designed to do low-level programming for tasks like writing operating systems, and C++ is just an extension of the C language to support Object-Oriented Programming. Both C and C++ are lower-level and more general purpose than Fortran. Fortran is a domain-specific language, meaning it was meant for a special purpose, which in this case is doing mathematical operations, and it's very good for those sorts of things. It's trivial to create multidimensional arrays in Fortran, which is useful for many math operations, but C doesn't even support anything beyond 1D arrays. Sure you can mimic multidimensional arrays by keeping track of stride length, etc., but that's a lot of work, and I'm betting that's work a lot of scientists would rather not do. That's just one example of Fortran being friendlier for science. I'm sure there are other examples, but I'm not a programmer, and definitely NOT a Fortran programmer. I think the main reason most people look at Fortran as an old and outdated language is because it stuck to the "punch card" formatting long after punch cards and punch card readers disappeared, but I'm not sure who to blame for that. Do I blame my freshman "Programming for Engineers" instructor who taught me Fortran 77 in 1991, or do I blame whoever maintains the Fortran standard for not updating it before then? (I honestly don't know what the latest version of Fortran was in the fall of 1991). Prentice _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf@beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbeowulf.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fbeowulf&data=04%7C01%7CRenfro%40tntech.edu%7C8486662b21394e7039e408d8745157c5%7C66fecaf83dc04d2cb8b8eff0ddea46f0%7C1%7C0%7C637387240011631429%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=lpfkkIZiPQ734YkMGHzI3M27w5RmZhkJ8dDbAD765dQ%3D&reserved=0<https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https*3A*2F*2Fbeowulf.org*2Fcgi-bin*2Fmailman*2Flistinfo*2Fbeowulf&data=04*7C01*7CRenfro*40tntech.edu*7C8486662b21394e7039e408d8745157c5*7C66fecaf83dc04d2cb8b8eff0ddea46f0*7C1*7C0*7C637387240011631429*7CUnknown*7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0*3D*7C1000&sdata=lpfkkIZiPQ734YkMGHzI3M27w5RmZhkJ8dDbAD765dQ*3D&reserved=0__;JSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSU!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!dbjGYkPB4I_e3Mpwg3ymxEHvrBoG1cZSjqXNtiKg304pOV-Gy0YzVZwDH06Ry2bLTDuCUDU$> -- Prentice Bisbal Lead Software Engineer Research Computing Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory http://www.pppl.gov<https://urldefense.us/v3/__http:/www.pppl.gov__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!dbjGYkPB4I_e3Mpwg3ymxEHvrBoG1cZSjqXNtiKg304pOV-Gy0YzVZwDH06Ry2bL3ZCPgrk$> _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf@beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf<https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!c-aWiyODjwSo50dW5Q3cXH2mJBhypLMygw4UBq3lyyG660U51JMSiQvtxpJnoSqRRixEHHw$> _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf@beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf<https://urldefense.us/v3/__https:/beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf__;!!PvBDto6Hs4WbVuu7!c-aWiyODjwSo50dW5Q3cXH2mJBhypLMygw4UBq3lyyG660U51JMSiQvtxpJnoSqRRixEHHw$> -- Jim James Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com<mailto:jcow...@gmail.com>> Mob: +44 780 637 7146
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