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41 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
41 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
Hi, all,
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As you know, Remind has been around for a long time---over 36 years.
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It's written in C, and I think it's high time to rewrite it in a
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memory-safe language. After all, one CVE in 36 years is simply
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unacceptable.
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I was looking at writing it in Rust, but decided that Rust isn't quite
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mature enough yet. So I decided to do it in FORTAN-77. I chose
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FORTRAN-77 over the more obvious choice of COBOL because I studied
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engineering and not business.
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The rewrite will have the following implications:
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o Remind will henceforth be known as REMIND.
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o Sadly, I have to drop UTF-8 support. Your choices are ASCII or
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EBCDIC.
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o All statements must begin in column 7. That means you might need to
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edit your existing scripts to add 6 spaces at the beginning of the
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line.
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o Variables whose names begin with "I" through "N" can only hold INTs.
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o I will be setting up a store on my web site to sell punched cards.
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(Yes; those will be needed to run REMIND.)
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Now, I confess I haven't programmed in FORTRAN-77 in several decades,
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so I plan on using AI to assist me. After all, it has been trained on
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the mountains of open-source FORTRAN-77 code on the Internet.
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I anticipate the rewrite will take about 9 years. You can use this
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reminder to alert yourself to when it's ready:
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REM 1 APRIL 2035 MSG REMIND IN FORTRAN-77 READY. STOP.
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Regards,
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Dianne.
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