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1. mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 07:39:02 JST mcc

   #BabelOfCode 2024
   Week 4
   Language: FORTRAN

   Confidence level: High

   PREV WEEK: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113867584791780280
   RULES: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113676228091546556

   I was very excited about doing TCL this week, but I told myself the first time I get a two-dimensional array problem I'd go FORTRAN, so I guess this week is FORTRAN.

   A friend of mine who did AOC2024 in December noted the early challenges this year were *very* easy. Today's definitely is. I wonder if part 2 will have any depth.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 07:39:00 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @mcc does it have a y'all function? Because if so, I'm switching immediately

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 07:39:01 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I went into this thinking: C is basically cleaned up FORTRAN, right? I know C? This should be easy, right? Right off the bat I find there will be a lot of difficulties entirely not of the kind I'm used to in programming. After a brief adventure with accidentally naming my file .f and not .f90 causing horrific and baffling errors, I run a hello world off the Internet. There's a space before the printout. Hm, how do I turn that off?

     https://stackoverflow.com/a/31236043

     Oh my fuck, *what*?

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 07:39:01 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I get frustrated with C all the time for being fundamentally a 70s language. It may be I'm about to learn the pain of using a *50s language*.

     (Alternately, I hear modern FORTRAN has all kinds of fancy niceties like operator overloading and might not resemble traditional FORTRAN all that much. But then I have the problem if I pick up a random tutorial it's hard to guess which *decade's* standard it's teaching me from, or if it's the GNU extension, if the GNU extension is that different, etc.)

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 07:39:01 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Just learned FORTRAN has an aint() function

     Don't that just beat all

   • plinth (plinth@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:00:49 JST plinth

     in reply to

     • Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     @mcc @foone can it be regionalized for Pittsburgh to be 'yunz'?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:00:49 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • plinth

     @plinth @mcc I recently wrote some code to automatically handle pronouns in a dialogue system, clearly I should extend it to handle the third person plurals.

     I'm from the south, so my plural pronouns are ya/ll

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:00:50 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     @foone pretty sure no

     I assume that the "y'all" keyword would be a standin for every variable in scope. So you say

     y'all += 4

     and it adds 4 to all variables.

     It might be possible to implement this in userspace in Python.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:19:02 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

     @whitequark @mcc evil!

     and it inspires me to do something somewhat similar for my terrible printf-debugging function

   • ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:19:03 JST ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

     in reply to

     • Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     @mcc @foone easy

   • ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 09:19:04 JST ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

     in reply to

     • Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     @mcc @foone yeah i can do this in python, one sec

     Foone🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:20 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I wound up slowly picking my way through the 2008 language spec, as previously mentioned not super readable. But I got it to work:

     https://github.com/mcclure/aoc2024/blob/a8835dcd8ad0162268ef16708f9a7cd8b6d45958/04-01-wordsearch/src/puzzle.f90

     Annoyed I had to spend all this time just doing file management, I decided to do the file management REALLY WELL. It's got unique error messages for different types of file handling errors and everything!

     Now if only I could make gfortran suppress that darn `error stop` backtrace..

     (2/2)

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:20 JST mcc

     in reply to

     By the way, check out this vaguely hilarious section from the FORTRAN 2008 spec, where they state in the *most noncommital terms possible* that a byte is *probably* 8 bits (they don't say "byte"; they don't like the word "byte"; the word "byte" appears exactly twice in the 621-page spec, both times in the C interoperability section) then have this long additional note falling all over themselves to apologize for the hubris of suggesting that a byte is probably 8 bits.

   • polprog68k (gorplop@pleroma.m68k.church)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:20 JST polprog68k

     in reply to
     @mcc 8-bit octet, specifically as opposed to the 7-bit septet and 9-bit nonet, and the 16-bit sedecimet
   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:21 JST mcc

     in reply to

     git discovery: you cannot check a file you do not have permissions to into a repository.

     problem: my repo contains a directory of test files. this directory contains a second directory of "invalid" tests, i.e., tests that the program is *expected* to fail on (and if it doesn't fail cleanly that's an error). one of the "invalid" tests is a file the program doesn't have read permissions to.

     I cannot check my "file with no read permissions" test case into the repository :(

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:21 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Since automatic deferred length initialization is not working as the spec seems to require, I decided to just read the file in line by line.

     This was much harder than I expected! The GNU docs do not well describe READ/WRITE, but do well describe the standard library functions. So I wrote around FGETC(), but then it turned out this is a GNU extension (or possibly was in FORTRAN 77 but not future FORTRANS?) so I had to rewrite to use normal READ in "Stream mode"… not in the GNU docs * _ *

     (1/2)

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:22 JST mcc

     in reply to

     FORTRAN 2008 spec 9.1:
     "A file is composed of either a sequence of file storage units (9.3.5) or a sequence of records… A file composed of file storage
     13 units is called a stream file."

     The definition of "file storage units" (9.3.5):
     "A file storage unit is the basic unit of storage in a stream file or an unformatted record file."

     The linked definition of "Stream file" (1.3.139)
     A file composed of a sequence of le storage units (9.1)

     YOU ASSHOLES, THIS DEFINITION IS CIRCULAR!

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:22 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Like okay I understand what you are trying to do here is not commit to a particular byte length because you want to support 7-bit bytes, 8-bit bytes, and possibly UTF-16 characters or something, but YOU COULD HAVE *SAID SO* INSTEAD OF MAKING A LOOP OF 3 DEFINITIONS LINKING TO EACH OTHER

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:23 JST mcc

     in reply to

     This is the second time in the longform challenge I have found myself having to implement fprintf() [the other time was Forth]. Both languages do predate C, but I was hoping both would have, at some point in the last 55 years, realized "oh… people want to be able to input line-delimited text files" and added such a feature.

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:23 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Incidentally, I am very comfortable usually with reading language specifications, but I got hold of a copy of the FORTRAN 2008 spec and… this is one of the least friendly language specifications I've ever seen, when reading it to try to determine how a program should be written.

     (Trivia: When the image on the right says something like "the value must be YES or NO" what they mean is "the value must be 'YES' or 'NO'.)

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:24 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Oh my hell lol, I sincerely believe I have found a bug (standard nonconformance) in GNU FORTRAN 14.2.0 and I have a repro case

     https://github.com/mcclure/aoc2024/blob/b31be91adb5a0721f97e2ba8f145da4f36129753/04-01-wordsearch/src/puzzle.f90

     Am I going to have to figure out how to report a bug on GNU. Geez. Is this going to be like the bureaucracy planet scene in Jupiter Rising

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:24 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Now that I have successfully figured out how to read an argument from the command line without knowing its length ahead of time, I am stuck on figuring out how to read a line of text from a file without knowing its length ahead of time. Apparently not an expected FORTRAN use case. I think the trick I was using before will not work, or at least, I *think*

     read(10,"(a)",size=line_length,advance='NO') line_in

     should read a line without advancing the filehandle and save the size. But it saves 0.

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:25 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Here is my current program. At the moment, all it does is take a command line argument (a path) and attempt to open the specified file. I build it with `gfortran src/puzzle.f90 -std=f2023 -o program`

     https://github.com/mcclure/aoc2024/blob/822e460f81b944c21ca675303b868c45b22a4c2b/04-01-wordsearch/src/puzzle.f90

     I'm having two problems, one serious, one unserious.

     The unserious problem: I want to abort if the # of arguments is bad. If I do "error stop", it prints a backtrace, which I didn't ask for. If I do "call abort", gfortran fails to link ("undefined reference to 'abort_').

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:25 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Here's my serious FORTRAN problem (code link in previous post):

     The recommended GET_COMMAND_ARGUMENT function seems to assume you know the length of the argument ahead of time. Obviously, I don't.

     https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/GET_005fCOMMAND_005fARGUMENT.html

     It allows me to pass in an `allocatable` string, but I believe it is leaving that string of length 0 if I do not ALLOCATE() it, and the fetched string is ''. Is there a way to get the length of a command-line argument before GET-ing it?

     I see GET_COMMAND, but that's… awkward

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:25 JST mcc

     in reply to

     …hm. I am concerned.

     According to the FORTRAN working group

     https://wg5-fortran.org/N2201-N2250/N2212.pdf

     As of the 2023 standard, an un-allocated deferred-length variable may have its length set by calling intrinsic procedures; they give GET_COMMAND as an example specifically, and StackOverflow users assert GET_COMMAND_ARGUMENT is also included.

     I don't get this behavior. My argument is being input as ''.

     Do you think this means my code (linked above) is wrong, or that gfortran -std=f2023 is nonconformant?

   • mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 31-Jan-2025 21:17:26 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I am getting a weird floaty feeling from FORTRAN. I do not at any point really understand what I'm doing, but I am having little to no problems having any one particular thing. I keep doing google searches and getting which I do not understand the syntax of ( `write(error_unit, *) "String to write"`— wait, what? but which work. I do not know if I'd be able to get anywhere with this language if I didn't have either a more experienced programmer or Google+Stack Overfow.