Hi, all,

As you know, Remind has been around for a long time---over 36 years.
It's written in C, and I think it's high time to rewrite it in a
memory-safe language.  After all, one CVE in 36 years is simply
unacceptable.

I was looking at writing it in Rust, but decided that Rust isn't quite
mature enough yet.  So I decided to do it in FORTAN-77.  I chose
FORTRAN-77 over the more obvious choice of COBOL because I studied
engineering and not business.

The rewrite will have the following implications:

o Remind will henceforth be known as REMIND.

o Sadly, I have to drop UTF-8 support.  Your choices are ASCII or
  EBCDIC.

o All statements must begin in column 7.  That means you might need to
  edit your existing scripts to add 6 spaces at the beginning of the
  line.

o Variables whose names begin with "I" through "N" can only hold INTs.

o I will be setting up a store on my web site to sell punched cards.
  (Yes; those will be needed to run REMIND.)

Now, I confess I haven't programmed in FORTRAN-77 in several decades,
so I plan on using AI to assist me.  After all, it has been trained on
the mountains of open-source FORTRAN-77 code on the Internet.

I anticipate the rewrite will take about 9 years.  You can use this
reminder to alert yourself to when it's ready:

      REM 1 APRIL 2035 MSG REMIND IN FORTRAN-77 READY. STOP.

Regards,

Dianne.
