The Original 'Ode To Joy' thread

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by wblipp

This week the review material is Numerical Methods. I am less helpful with this material - about the only classroom thing I remember is Rung-Kutta integration. The standard description uses "k" for some of the variables. In the era when Fortran was the standard for these kinds of computations, many students fell prey to the bug of failing to declare k (or rename it). This gave me an opportunity to tell the Fortran joke "GOD is Real." "Yes, but JESUS is integer." After explaining it, I a got dry sarcastic "Very funny." I said, "It's about as funny as Fortran jokes get."

Originally Posted by xilman

The version I learned goes "GOD is REAL, except when declared INTEGER". Equally funny.

Another one went something like

      INTEGER X11H2I=1
10    FORMAT(X11H2I)=SIN(1.0)
      WRITE(5,10) FORMAT(X11H2I)

which is valid FORTRAN-IV but what happens in practice is entirely up to the compiler. The FORTRAN-IV standard was completely uncompilable because the line 10 above is intrinsically ambiguous.

There were lots of other fun things you could do in that language, including redefining the values of constants such as "1". The program snippet

      SUBROUTINE FOO(X)
      X=2
      RETURN
 
      FOO(1)
      WRITE(5,10) 1
10    FORMAT(X2I)

would output "2" on many systems.


Apologies if the examples above aren't completely correct. It's 35 years since I last wrote FORTRAN-IV and I don't have a compiler to hand to test them.

Paul

Originally Posted by Christenson

1986 on the VAX was the last time I used a FORTRAN compiler...I was writing a small FORTRAN compiler in VAX FORTRAN-77 plus...recursion was a bit tricky..

Bit windy today.
Think I'll either go sailing or treat myself to a bit of
easy listening

David

[Xyzzy]

We recently passed the "hands-on" part of our motorcycle certification and we are now fully licensed.

To be prepared, we spent numerous hours in parking lots weaving through cones and performing emergency stops and all sorts of tasks you might expect to find on a "hands-on" test. We also clocked around 2,500 miles on our motorcycle.

So we show up for the test and the state highway patrol lady verifies we are who we claim to be, checks our blinkers and brake light and has us ride to the end of the road and back.

And that was it.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

So we show up for the test and the state highway patrol lady verifies we are who we claim to be, checks our blinkers and brake light and has us ride to the end of the road and back.

And that was it.

Maybe she is a member of this forum and has been keeping tabs on you.

[Flatlander]

I would have gone straight to my wife and said, "She obviously fancied me."

I say things like that a lot. "I can tell she fancies me by the way she's ignoring me. She's over compensating."

Let me dream, okay.

[Christenson]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

We recently passed the "hands-on" part of our motorcycle certification and we are now fully licensed.

To be prepared, we spent numerous hours in parking lots weaving through cones and performing emergency stops and all sorts of tasks you might expect to find on a "hands-on" test. We also clocked around 2,500 miles on our motorcycle.

So we show up for the test and the state highway patrol lady verifies we are who we claim to be, checks our blinkers and brake light and has us ride to the end of the road and back.

And that was it.

The lady has seen enough riders to notice the effect of all that practice....and she saw you practicing in that parking lot....

[rogue]

The Brewers just won in the bottom of the 10th! On to the NLCS.

[petrw1]

5,000 GhzDays TF Lifetime
1,000 Completions P-1 Large Last 365 days
2,000 Completions P-1 Large LifeTime

[Flatlander]

Just played 'PRIMES' in Words With Friends for 49 points.
And people say my years here have been a waste of time.

[NBtarheel_33]

36,535 GHz-days lifetime = just over a GHz-century! (Or 36.535 THz-days. Not sure which one sounds more impressive...)

Forward march...on to the elusive GHz-millennium/THz-year (three of which curtisc can produce in a single year).

Incidentally, anyone notice that GIMPS is sustaining 70 TFLOPS over a whole month?! All the GPUs, no doubt.

[petrw1]

1. My first Quad (Q9550) is 3 years old today and coincidentally reached 10,000 GhzDays today on his birthday.

2. My second Quad (i5-750 OC'd to 3.2) surpassed 10,000 Ghz Days about 10 days ago ... just short of his second birthday.

3. Just surpassed 100 P-1 completions in the GPU to 72 sub project. http://gpu.mersenne.info/

[petrw1]

10th place P-1 for the year