STORMS AND COMPUTER LANGUAGE

On the night of the 15^th October 1987 I drove to the Haymarket Theatre Leicester to see a production of Room Service directed by Keith Hack. Mark Steyn of the Independent had reviewed the show and commented about Pamela Moiseiwitsch’s performance ‘as the playwrights shy sweetheart’ Hilda Manney ‘Nothing she says is actually funny, yet her presence elicits almost nonstop chuckling and giggling. This is because she assumes a very funny Gracie Allen voice and accompanies it with gurgling, swallowing and delicate coughing, fluttery gestures and little skipping movements. This brilliantly detailed performance…”

Christopher Ryan, Clive Arrindell, Gavin Richards,

After the show we drove back to London along the M1 through what turned out to be the Great Storm of 1987.  An unusually strong weather system caused winds to hit much of southern England and northern France. It was the worst storm to hit England since the Great Storm of 1703 (284 years earlier) and was responsible for the deaths of at least 22 people in England and France combined (18 in England, at least four in France).

According to the Beaufort Scale of wind intensities, this storm had winds of hurricane force; however, the term hurricane refers to tropical cyclones originating in the North Atlantic or North Pacific. Hurricanes have a very different wind profile and distribution from storms, and significantly higher precipitation levels.

The storm was declared a rare event, expected to happen only once every several hundred years. However, the Burns’ Day Storm hit the United Kingdom in January 1990, less than three years later and with comparable intensity.

On the language front: 

The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704

(15 October 1956), the first Programmer's Reference

Manual for Fortran

Fortran, the first modern computer language, is shared with the coding community for the first time on the 15^th October 1956. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather predictions (although it didn’t seem to do much in October 1987), finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing] and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran (a blend derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with previous versions. This is not the most inspiring tutorial-

But for a lecture on computer languages, try this: