29 November 2020
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Now i am learning Fortran 77...
Ok, to answer the first question: WHY???
Its simple: As i have mentioned in some other posts, my wife and i are 
converting an old barn to our new home. As for money shortage, we are forced
to build much of the enterior ourself, which forces me to calculate some 
things like stairs and so on. The sane solution would be to go to Excel or
OpenOffice or even some of the online-tools presented by google. 

But hey, i am writing this post on an Atari ST using a telnet connection
to a unix machine where i am typing on the "ed" editor. How likely is it that
i use the "sane" solution? 

On the -somewhat- sane side: Fortran makes it really simple to throw some
statements together to compute some things. I can really understand why this
language has such an stable standing in the scientific and engineering 
community. It took me only about an hour (including the installation of the
compiler) until my first stair calculator was working. It would have taken
much LESS than an hour if i had read first about the somewhat arcane way
Fortran expects you to place your statements. Column 1 - 6 are for Labels,
comments and so on, and only after column 6 you can insert your "real" code.

But, now after a few hours of wild coding i can really say: I like it!