Programming Has Sure Changed — blog.acthompson.net

Last week, I was reading some old code. I wrote it in 1975. It was in FORTRAN IV and it was on punch cards. Really bad code. One character, meaningless variable names. Lots of goto statements. FORTRAN IV didn't have while loops but you could get the same thing with goto if done right. Someone is probably going to argue that if there are goto statements its not right but it was the only way back in the day.  The famous “GOTO considered harmful” paper had  been written but not universally accepted yet. FORTRAN IV had not adopted language features to make it easy yet.

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