• Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    idk, this arbitrary i-n range behaving differently than other variables sounds like a terrible source of weird bugs to me. I don’t think variable names should ever change a program’s behavior.

    edit:

    Many old Fortran 77 programs uses these implicit rules, but you should not! The probability of errors in your program grows dramatically if you do not consistently declare your variables.

    source

    • Successful_Try543@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      This comes from early years, when FORTRAN was introduced and the programmers needed to save space in the punch cards. Today, to avoid this possible source of bugs, you usually state “implicit none” in the preamble.

      • GregoryTheGreat
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        1 year ago

        So I’ve been an engineer doing code ports to newer versions of Fortran. I never knew why that was at the top of every file. Thank you.