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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:13:07 -0500
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 11:13:03 -0700
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: Arithmetic overflow checking
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On 7/16/2011 10:46 AM, lewbloch wrote:
...
> Over three decades as a professional programmer, I've had to know a
> zillion languages to avoid obsolescence.  Those who stuck with Fortran
> when C became popular found themselves marginalized with frightening
> speed, although of course there is still Fortran work out there.  C
> programmers had to know shell programming and assembler to get any
> work done.  ...

If I had picked a couple of programming languages near the start of my
career, they would have been Fortran and NEAT/3 Level 2 (the assembly
language for the NCR Century computers).

I don't believe I would have had anywhere near as long, or fun, a career
without continuous willingness to learn programming languages.

In my last professional project, I wrote code in Java, Verilog, Perl,
and Forth.

Patricia