Newsgroup: comp.unix.programmer

J.F. Cornwall wrote:
> Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
>> A quick note to inform my fellow Unix developers that my new book 
>> "Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective" (Addison-Wesley, 2006) has 
>> just been published.  All 623 examples I use in the book are drawn 
>> from actual code; most of them from Unix tools and system software.  
>> For more
>> details you can visit the book's web site at 
>> <http://www.spinellis.gr/codequality?cup>.
>>
> 
> Any plans to add Fortran to the languages analyzed and discussed?  There 
> are 2 active Fortran 95 compilers (g95 and gfortran) and of course the 
> venerable g77, and "many" (!) programs out there written in Fortran...
> 
> No, it isn't a dead language, no matter what anyone says.

I originally planned to include a chapter with separate sections for 
languages like Fortran, C#, Pascal, Ruby, Cobol, Perl, and Python. 
However, I ditched this approach in favor of discussing the principles 
in a way that applies to most languages, using C as the lowest common 
denominator, and Java and C++ for discussing object-oriented concepts. 
I mention Fortran specifically only in "Code Reading" when I discuss the 
lazy evaluation of Boolean expressions (in contrast to C and Java, 
Fortran compilers are allowed to short-circuit or to evaluate all terms).

I agree that there is a lot of important Fortran code around, and that 
old-style Fortran programs require their own techniques for 
comprehending them, but I'm afraid I'm not qualified to write about that 
topic.

Diomidis

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