Hi gil,
I remember reading the article approximately 40 years ago.
It was in Datamation, which was an IT magazine.
You've never heard of Datamation before? ... How many years have you
been in this business?
The story was related to an unmanned spaceship (i.e. Venus Probe) whose
trajectory was calculated by a FORTRAN program
with the following statements:
DO 3 I=1.3
.
.
3
Since there was a period between "1" and "3" (instead of a comma), the
loop ran precisely once
and assigned 1.3 to DO3I (FORTRAN removes blanks before compile) a
variable which is automatically declared REAL, because its first letter
is outside the INTEGER Range I-N.
Here is another reference (not Datamation) (which does not mention the
financial loss)
Please see:
IEEE Xplore Full-Text PDF:
<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4392951>
Page 58
Regards,
David
On 2022-03-29 10:37, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
On Tue, 29 Mar 2022 09:22:10 -0400, David Spiegel wrote:
You said: "... BTW, the change in format of the DO was essential
in preventing the flaw in FORTRAN (which still exists)
by which a period instead of the first comma
changes the DO statement into an assignment statement. ..."
Do pedantic compilers warn of that? But it might be inicidental
to warning of unused variables.
Most languages have such pitfalls. A favorite is the ALGOL-60
implied comment. Pedantic compilers warn of that.
Have you ever read the Datamation article regarding the comma which cost
$15,00,000 (in the '60s)?
Did you just supply an example ("$15,00.000")? If not, cite.
In IT or in law?
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