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Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

COBOL, Assembler, and FORTRAN are actually kind of cool.

Having spent much of my time in Fortan 90 the last couple of months - I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on this one. You know all these people saying "when will I ever have to write mu own hash table?" Well, when you start working in Fortran.

There are hashtable implementations for Fortran such as in FLIBS.

F90 isn't bad, try F77. F90 and on you had more options with the layout of your program so that it was actually sensible. And you can use recursion without having to check if your compiler supports it. And reentrant functions.

But the built-in types are collection types are anemic, it's similar to C in that regard. It's a relatively low-level language compared to other high-level languages. But if I were doing math/simulation stuffs, I would definitely consider using it again.

Just, please, no more embedded programs written in Fortran. That was a bad idea (unless it's doing complex math like for the radar system).

Me too... the lack of decent non-array containers is frustrating. The string handling is also painful (seemingly TRIM everywhere). I've also hit several compiler bugs trying to use fairly new features.

Do you have some weird constraint where you can't use 3rd party libraries? Yeah, hash tables aren't built into the language, but libraries to provide them are all over the place. See for example http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Hash+tables. Or you could a C function. Or C++ in some compilers.

I can use them in the sense that I'm allowed to, but the compiler that I use can't compile FLIBS nor most of the libraries in your link; and the ones it could compile, I had to adapt, requiring understanding of what a 'hash table' is beyond just 'it's a key to value mapping'. I didn't want to make my post all about my Fortran problems, but I still think knowing the basics of fundamental data structures is foundational knowledge.

Well, sure knowing the basics of fundamental data structures is foundational knowledge. But you were complaining about lack of hash tables, and it seems what you really had was compiler issues. That's not something unique to Fortran.

Surprised still using fortran 90. Thought everything now is 95 or 2003 and up.

I've never seen COBOL described as cool before, and I must respectfully disagree. COBOL is horrible and uncool -- I should know, I used in one of my first jobs.

Assembly language is kind of cool, though!

Coolness is probably not what matters in a programming language - but they’re efficient in their niches.

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