[TriEmbed] Hacking a fake vintage radio (with Arduino + Pi 0)

[John Vaughters]

>DEC VAXes running VMS

That is exactly what I learned FORTRAN on too. A room full of green screens. Also the software I am referring to right now was a throwback from the VMS environment as well. I too hadn't seen FORTRAN in umpteen years when I first got here. But upon researching it, I found out it is still considered the best code for performance in highly computational software and the Intel optimized compiler is a must for performance. They even tried to replace this FORTRAN code with C++ once long ago and could not get the performance needed and then abandoned it. But now it is being replaced with C++ for sure. It's a behemoth program, so lot's of challenges.

John Vaughters






On Wednesday, July 1, 2020, 11:54:08 AM EDT, Scott Hall <scottghall1 at gmail.com> wrote: 





I learned FORTRAN in highschool (late '70s) and converted an Apple ][ Applesoft BASIC interpreter into a FORTRAN-4 interpreter -- I found out that the two languages were very similar token for token and just edited the strings recognized for the tokens.  Other than one class project in college (1980) where we had to use the then already vintage card punch and batch submit a simulation program (in a C class of all things - they wanted us to know about FORTRAN because of its connections to SPICE for circuit analysis), it was 23 years before I would use it again.

I worked a contract at a big food company that was rewriting their nutrition label database access after a big merger, and since it was on DEC VAXes running VMS they insisted that it be developed in Fortran so their MIS folks could maintain it.  (I was primarily a C/C++ programmer in UNIX and thus a fish out of water, but I was the only poor schlub that would work the contract)  At that time DEC's Fortran had evolved a lot to go with free-form whitespace no longer column controlled and no continuation "cards" - the compiler even allowed macro preprocessors and linking with the C libraries in order to use RDB database functions and embedded SQL.  Needless to say I utilized all the latest features of DEC Fortran at the time and my code looked an awful lot like a C program, to the consternation of the MIS guys.  Their next contract with us ended up in C++ with a lot of non-object style coding so their MIS guys could maintain it afterwards - much like the Arduino "Wiring" code of today.