Leica M8 bad Line interpolation. Or what you can do with Three lines of Fortran

Sonnar Brian said:
One time I printed a object file by mistake and the paper was ejecting from the line printer so fast it almost hit the ceiling. I was in the computer room and terminated the job. Days of perforated paper and the big printers.

If I'm not writing code in Fortran, it's because I'm writing assembly.
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Did Assembly for about 40 years at work, until I retired 5 years ago.
The best way to know your bits and bytes.
 
I wrote my Disassembler in Fortran, "Executes" the code as it is disassembling to track segment registers and bank registers. That was Fun.
 
Always was glad I rarely had to get that far down into the weeds 🙂 And preferred when I had a nice lisp inbetween me and that messy hardware 😉

Bur when you have to deal with drivers and the like, well, then the portable assembler comes out and nothing beats C for that on the machines I dealt with (unixen after all).
 
wlewisiii said:
…Bur when you have to deal with drivers and the like, well, then the portable assembler comes out and nothing beats C for that on the machines I dealt with (unixen after all).
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Once upon a time I was the SW lead on a Fortran project, we got a guy assigned onto the project who was a fan of C. One day he says (with full seriousness) “we should do this in C, It’s great because you can have the compiler output assembly, then you can mod the assembly code, and create a binary that doesn’t match your source code.

My reaction was 😱, but I just said we’re doing it in Fortran because that’s what the customer specified.
 
My Fortran Compilers do output Assembly Language- but I have never modified it.
I did rewrite some of the routines in FORLIB for the CP/m FORTRAN compiler, which required disassembling the library. Factor of 2 speed-up for multiply and divide, using the extra Z80 registers and instructions. The Microsoft library used only 8080 instructions.
I also found and HEX Patched some errors in the IBM Professional Fortran compiler for MS-DOS.
And several others such things.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
My Fortran Compilers do output Assembly Language- but I have never modified it.
I did rewrite some of the routines in FORLIB for the CP/m FORTRAN compiler, which required disassembling the library. Factor of 2 speed-up for multiply and divide, using the extra Z80 registers and instructions. The Microsoft library used only 8080 instructions.
I also found and HEX Patched some errors in the IBM Professional Fortran compiler for MS-DOS.
And several others such things.
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Do you also read runes?
 
pixelated said:
Once upon a time I was the SW lead on a Fortran project, we got a guy assigned onto the project who was a fan of C. One day he says (with full seriousness) “we should do this in C, It’s great because you can have the compiler output assembly, then you can mod the assembly code, and create a binary that doesn’t match your source code.

My reaction was 😱, but I just said we’re doing it in Fortran because that’s what the customer specified.
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I never had any problem with Fortran but Unix was built on C so to drivers and other system code, you're stuck with it. Though now they're trying to turn the Linux kernel into Rust (the language) with various degrees of success depending on who you ask. Each tool has it's appropriate use case.
 
I worked with a fellow who taught himself Assembler by reading COBOL dumps and the IBM Principles of Operations. He was a tech programmer and the joy of his professional life was reading on-line dumps. He would root through those damned things like a little kid opening presents on Christmas morning. He could also dead lift 400 pounds and had a special fridge that held a half keg of beer. He emptied it in two weeks.

He was also totally blind.

He was at a party with other tech guys one night and was whining that he never drove a car. A guy there told him, "OK, Dave, let's go." Dave was put in a car, instructed as to the controls and the "passenger" talked him through the steering, stopping and starting. Dave joked, "It was OK, I was drunk when I did it." Keep this fellow in mind when you think of Assembler and tech programmers. ;o)
 
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