Re:Fortran is still a thing
by Koshkin on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @04:49PM
(#18547155)
Is the Medieval French "the same language" as the modern French? It is French after all, right?
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Is a 80 year old person the same person and with the same ideas, abilities, look, as when he was a 15 year old person? He has the same name after all.
Same language doesn't mean you can necessarily speak it without learning the new words, forgetting some stuff that went deprecated, learning some syntactic sugar and new features. If you were born in 1400 and lived to today, you'd be going from speaking from Medieval French to modern French with hardly noticing the difference...
Looks like Clinton was right saying that “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
Well, I think that's a reasonable analogy, except that with spoken language evolution, the unintelligibility tends to be mutual, whereas with Fortran there's substantial compatibility in one direction (i.e., GFortran will happily compile anything from f77 to Fortran 2008)