When I programmed FORTRAN, there were much uglier things to shoot yourself in the foot with. For example, parameter lists in function calls were not checked: y

When I programmed FORTRAN, there were much uglier things to shoot yourself in the foot with. For example, parameter lists in function calls were not checked: you pass in a double, and the function expects an integer? Good luck with that, the compiler didn't warn about it and no value conversion would take place (the runtime would just interpret part of the bit pattern of the double as an int), and it would probably crash at runtime. Luckily we have function prototypes in C nowadays ;-)