I've always liked Fortran - one big project I wrote in Fortran 77 was an Intel 8080 simulator that was used for teaching at the Polytechnic I worked for. The or

I've always liked Fortran - one big project I wrote in Fortran 77 was an Intel 8080 simulator that was used for teaching at the Polytechnic I worked for. The original code was on a Dec10, but I ported it to a VAX and an IBM 4381 in a couple of days. It's an easy language to get to grips with, but the users somewhat less so. At one point doing consultancy, I came across people declaring variables like I1,I2,I3,I4 to IN where N was a large number. I asked "why?" and they said "we might need them" - Fortran programmers will see at least two reasons why this is daft.