Community Forum

[JohnNichols]

Dear Mary:

I just had a long chuckle in the Intel C++ Forum.  I have been working on getting Intercal to run on Intel C++ compiler.  Intercal is an interesting program and I am just playing at the end of semester before the summer hard work starts. 

I dislike C, but Intercal is so bizarre I am enjoying looking into the programming minds of some deeply disturbed people, the error messages demonstrate the sort of problems seen in 1969 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/07/16/apollo-11s-infamous-landing-error-code-1202-offers-earthly-lessons-for-self-driving-cars/?sh=46b6298134bc 

and they provide no more information than 1202 did with a guy with a hand written list in mission control.  The Forbes article is worth reading. 

An Intel guy said, this forum is Intel C++ questions and I am closing the thread.  I immediately thought of you and your kind emails. 

Sometimes, human interaction is for human interaction sake and not to solve a problem.  

Anyway, Intercal is an object lesson in looking at the code from some real experts who just want to get it done and do not care about nice easy read. It also shows the fact that compilers can take a lot of small mistakes and still work out the code.   It is a nightmare of named goto's etc... 

So thanks for being human 

JMN

[Steve_Lionel]

I'm not sure Mary is still around, and I know she did not keep up with forum content. As you know, INTERCAL was intended as a joke/parody.  I can understand if technical support forums for other languages would not look kindly at threads started regarding INTERCAL. These Intel community forums are not intended for social activities. I think it would be best to stick to Intel Fortran topics here.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

There used to be a forum titled Water cooler...

Ideal place for INTERCAL

Jim Dempsey

[AlHill]

I agree.  There are no "general discussion" groups or forums here.  There are plenty of forums on the net that have such social groups and general discussions.  JMN can spew his life's history and how interesting things are in those groups.

Doc (not an Intel employee or contractor)

[JohnNichols]

Your kind words brought this to mind:

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

True Intercal is a parody. It is also 6000 lines of excellent code that show you how to do things I did not know how to do and provide excellent comments to explain the program.  An if, else statement is the same in all languages, one does not have just study Fortran to get better. If you want to write better Fortran programs learn LISP.  If you want to see brilliance then read Intercal.  Of course it was spread across about 15 files so it was hard to see the insights, but I now have it in two files, a h and a cpp. Now it shines. 

If this forum is just to answer questions about Fortran Intel and nothing else, then it is a poor learning tool for people or a resource for future students, one day Steve will no longer be with us, but I want to be able to find his articles.  

Students need support as well as answers.  

So enjoy the day and remember you do not have to read what I write - just skip it. Really easy. 

[MaryT_Intel · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the feedback, @JohnNichols ,

Can you share the thread that was being closed so I can review for kindness? 

And... we totally agree about having some forums just for discussing things, not necessarily solving an issue. We are working on it!  Let me know what topics you'd like the forums to be called and we can create those for you. I remember there used to be something called Watercooler, but it wasn't really descriptive (also hard for someone where English isn't their first language).

We aim to please so send suggestions. We're also going to put up an Ideas section, but again, need to do some re-design of the site to figure out where everything goes.  I appreciate the great input and will definitely read the Apollo 11 error code article.

Thanks so much,

Mary T.

Support Community Manager

[JohnNichols]

@jimdempseyatthecove 

Actually Intercal is a perfect teaching tool for any language.  I want my students to try Intel Fortran but they are pushed to Python, after all as one told me in Python there are no ints and reals just numbers.  

We are all human, we have foibles, just getting along is an exercise in patience.  

Watercooler excellent idea - although you could do what the Roman's did and call it the Forum. 

[jimdempseyatthecove]

>>no ints and reals just numbers...

C++ now has auto

auto foo = ...;

where foo assumes the type of whatever gobbly **bleep** ... produces. This may be what you wanted or something entirely different. Note, type is not restricted to a number.

Several years ago (2003) I wrote a collection of C++ struct/class that enforced dimensional consistency (physics term). For example: poundForce, slugs, Kilograms, feetPerSecond, metersPerSecond, seconds, etc...

The class/structure would provide for unit conversion as long as there was dimensional consistency, if not a compile time error was generated. It would also accept a text string with appropriate suffixes (e.g. read from file)

Kilograms mass = textVar; // containing "1235slugs".

Jim Dempsey

[JohnNichols]

The real issue with Fortran is the lack of a fuzzy compiler that can fix obvious errors such as one misspelling in a 10000 lines of code, at the moment it merely flags it if you set the flags correctly,  0 and 1 cannot represent completely the range of all things, pity really. 

I really love Fortran and dislike C,  it took to much from LISP without the elegance of LISP. 

+ friendship is a weird thing, but thanks for the friendship Jim, always appreciated it. 

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Who edited my post?

RE: change to "gobbly **bleep**" from "gobbly g o o p" spaces to be deleted in last word.

Is "g o o p" now a forbidden word?!!?? If so, why. please explain.

Jim Dempsey

[andrew_4619]

Maybe there is an algorithm to stop mangled 'bad' words that stops all words it thinks are mangled by brute force?

[JohnNichols]

grand

organization of

oppressed

pheasants 

perhaps.  In which case you can understand the need for editing.  Of course Pheasant would make a great name for a Fortran program, one that was loud and noisy and did absolutely nothing,