some e-mail exchanged between me and William Waite, until recently, Professor at Colorado.
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 10:18:49PM +1000, Mullins wrote:
It’s nearly 2 years since I wrote, and have not yet replied to your
question about what prompted me to write.
I noticed that you retired last year, so I wasn’t thinking it was very
likely that this e-mail would reach you.
My reason for writing now is to ask do you know anyone who is able to
assess the quality of Fortran IV code?
WAITE: “Quality” is, of course, in the eye of the beholder!
me: Ideally, it would be possible to have some advanced tool which could
do this (just as people want to use theorem provers to prove code correct).
WAITE: Grumble… I think that quality judgements tend to be much more heuristic, and therefore outside the realm of even an advanced tool. We can certainly verify that a program adheres to some set of coding standards, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to quality.
me: However, it would not be necessary to have an automated method to
assess the quality of code. It would be possible to manually make
assertions about what the code was intended to do, and to check these
manually, either by running the code, or perhaps by checking it by eye.
WAITE: This sounds more like correctness than quality to me.
me: Besides yourself, Dijkstra and Brinch Hansen were names that
immediately came to my mind in 1976 (as people who might have been
experts in Fortran IV), but they are now deceased. Also, I am not sure
if Brinch Hansen knows anything about Fortran. I am not even sure if
Dijkstra knew much about Fortran, because he may have left it for Algol, long before Fortran IV.
WAITE: Dijkstra considered Fortran to be an “infantile disorder” and PL/1 a “fatal disease”. I doubt very much that he would have made any other judgements about the quality of specific programs.
Jeanne Adams would be one of the people I would have recommended, but unfortunately she is also now deceased. Walter S. Brainerd is a possibility — I haven’t found an obituary for him!
But actually, Fortran is alive and well in many places. Our local scientific computing shop, NCAR, uses it heavily.
me:
Yours truly
Richard Mullins
—–Original Message—–
From: William Waite [mailto:William.Waite@Colorado.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, 19 October 2005 2:31 AM
To: Mullins
Subject: Re: STAGE2
On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 01:20:21PM +1000, Mullins wrote:
Dear Dr Waite.
Regrettably I missed your talk “Gurus and the Gullible” which was
held at CSIRO in Canberra in mid 1977. I was at work and did not
take off the time to attend. Installed your stage2 software in the
1970’s and 1980’s. In recent years I downloaded code from Dr
Clarence Lehman of University of Minnesota, who installed STAGE2 in
C. Your contribution is greatly appreciated.
WAITE: It’s always nice to hear from satisfied users! But may I ask what
prompted this particular message?Duration : 0:0:11
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