Editing Fortran (section)

==Humor==
During the same FORTRAN standards committee meeting at which the name "FORTRAN 77" was chosen, a satirical technical proposal was incorporated into the official distribution bearing the title "Letter O [[considered harmful|Considered Harmful]]".  This proposal purported to address the confusion that sometimes arises between the letter "O" and the numeral zero, by eliminating the letter from allowable variable names.  However, the method proposed was to eliminate the letter from the character set entirely (thereby retaining 48 as the number of lexical characters, which the colon had increased to 49).  This was considered beneficial in that it would promote structured programming, by making it impossible to use the notorious {{code|GO TO}} statement as before. (Troublesome {{code|FORMAT}} statements would also be eliminated.) It was noted that this "might invalidate some existing programs" but that most of these "probably were non-conforming, anyway".<ref>X3J3 post-meeting distribution for meeting held at Brookhaven National Laboratory in November 1976.</ref>{{unreliable source?|date=August 2014}}<ref>{{cite magazine |title=The obliteration of O |magazine=Computer Weekly |date=March 3, 1977}}</ref>

When X3J3 debated whether the minimum trip count for a DO loop should be zero or one in Fortran 77, Loren Meissner suggested a minimum trip count of two—reasoning ''(tongue-in-cheek)'' that if it were less than two, then there would be no reason for a loop.

When assumed-length arrays were being added, there was a dispute as to the appropriate character to separate upper and lower bounds. In a comment examining these arguments, Walt Brainerd penned an article entitled "Astronomy vs. Gastroenterology" because some proponents had suggested using the star or asterisk ("*"), while others favored the colon (":").{{Citation needed|date=July 2016}}

Variable names beginning with the letters I–N have a default type of integer, while variables starting with any other letters defaulted to real, although programmers could override the defaults with an explicit declaration.<ref>{{Cite manual|url=http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/805-4939/z40007365fbc/index.html|title=Rules for Data Typing (FORTRAN 77 Language Reference)|access-date=September 29, 2016}}</ref> This led to the joke: "In FORTRAN, GOD is REAL (unless declared INTEGER)."