I don’t do much programming these days as my job is more that of an architectural role. I am more of a “big picture” guy in designing large TCP/IP networks that move terrabits of traffic each day between major internet operations. When in the past I needed to move large amounts of data around and manipulate it, I used python. Lower level work like building network diagnostic tools was done in C.

It would be interesting to translate these programs line by line into something like python or R because the syntax of those languages make “weird” things easier to see. Python reads almost like English. You can actually code something and come back to it 5 years later and understand what you did, unlike Fortran or perl or even c. It is almost self-documenting. You have to TRY to make it hard to read.

But having a language where whitespace is significant trips some people up Put an extra space in front of a line and it becomes part of a completely different loop as python actually uses the level of indentation to determine where something belongs. C and Fortran use indentation only as a style enhancement to make the code easier to read, the indentation isn’t significant to the compiler/interpreter. It is to python.

What concerns me most are some comments in the HARRY file and some that others have made looking into the code about how it is build in places where it silently returns in some cases from error conditions. A routine can apparently be called that fails a bounds check and returns having done nothing at all and the calling program is unaware. In other words, the subroutine returns the same thing on failure or success and in some places makes no note of the failure.

I can see evidence of this in the HARRY file where the author is unsure of the right thing was even actually done and he seems resigned to simply crossing his fingers and hoping it all comes out ok. He isn’t positive that the output is correct at all and in the end he is simply wanting results to come out the same this time as it did last time or he wants his output to correlate to a model. As long as it does, he isn’t so interested in if it actually did what it was supposed to do.

He tries this and he tries that until he gets the output he wants. He doesn’t seem convinced that it is correct but it passes whatever test he applies to it at the end so that is “good enough”.

Going back to Warwick Hughes’ notice that a derived cell value can be larger than those from which it was derived, it is sort of like having a room full of people who are between 66 and 72 inches tall, taking an “average” of them, and coming up with 80 inches! It can’t happen that and average is larger than ANY of the numbers used to calculate the average. So that is why Hughes wanted the names of the stations in the surrounding cells and the code used to create the fill value.

As far as I know, he never got it.

Most likely if you go to any heavy compute shop, like oil reservoir modeling, the bulk of the code will still be FORTRAN 77. No one wants to rewrite that code to ‘C’ or ‘C++”.

Next we can talk about why Cobol and PL/I.

Rick

The answer is the PhDs. They use a tool called IDL to process and graph data (it is so antiquated). There are few older scientists who use modern programming languages, and that code looks likes some nightmare out of the 1980s.

Why did they use a program based in Fortran and not C++? Isn’t that a better language for this typ of project?

While not a computer programer, I have had some experience entering data into a statistical program. I am not an expert by any means but am at least a competant layman and have a fair understanding of basic statistical method

This data is garbage. A 15 year-old could do better than this.

If I’d turned this in as a project in grad school I’d have probably been thrown out of the class.

These people need to not only be removed from their jobs they need to be laughed at. Nothing is more humiliating to a professor, especially a leftist professor from the UK than to be laughed at.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Uncle! I will do the analysis (sort of boring not all that complicated)

But that score comparison is interesting though I don’t understand what it is doing well enough to figure out if I should care. I would have to go all the way back to the start of the program to make sure I understand what all the arrays are, etc. in order to understand what it is comparing and multiplying to come up with the score to decide what it is actually writing out.

Iowahawk Geographic: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers

My programming background is more in C and Python with a few other more obscure languages tossed in but I never picked up fortran (never had to) so it might take me a bit to get through it.