Fortran - Humor

Humor

During the same Fortran Standards Committee meeting at which the name "FORTRAN 77" was chosen, a technical proposal was incorporated into the official distribution, bearing the title, "Letter O considered harmful". This proposal purported to address the confusion that sometimes arises between the letter "O" and the numeral zero, by eliminating the letter from allowable variable names. However, the method proposed was to eliminate the letter from the character set entirely (thereby retaining 48 as the number of lexical characters, which the colon had increased to 49). This was considered beneficial in that it would promote structured programming, by making it impossible to use the notorious GO TO statement as before. (Troublesome FORMAT statements would also be eliminated.) It was noted that this "might invalidate some existing programs" but that most of these "probably were non-conforming, anyway".

During the standards committee battle over whether the "minimum trip count" for the FORTRAN 77 DO statement should be zero (allowing no execution of the block) or one (the "plunge-ahead" DO), another facetious alternative was proposed (by Loren Meissner) to have the minimum trip be two—since there is no need for a loop if it is only executed once.