In an earlier version of my Fortran language entry , I repeated the "well-known" Fortran bug that lost a spacecraft:
If a variable is not declared, it is implicitly given a type based on its first letter ( I to N being integers, the rest floats). This led to the famous case of losing a spacecraft, when DO I = 1.100 was used instead of DO I = 1,100 . The former statement assigns 1.100 to the variable DOI (spaces being ignored in names!), the latter is the start of a DO-loop.
However, on 25 February 1999, I received the following email from Brian Blank, which indicates that this well-known 'fact' is just an Urban Legend after all (which shows that I am just as guilty of repeating ULs as anyone):
Ordinarily I don't attempt to correct the web one fact at a time but a few days ago I received an email from a Belgian Scot who discovered one of my publicly accessible private pages via Alta Vista's infernal spider. It turns out that one of my computer factoids, the veracity of which I had confirmed in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, was wrong. I learned some interesting things in verifying my correspondent's claim and feel quite content that I am no longer propagating a myth.So either I am passing on a favor or seeking an outlet for revenge. The line of FORTRAN code
DO 10 I = 1.100apparently did indeed occur. The compiler apparently did what it was supposed to do, ignoring white space and implicitly declaring and then assigning DO10I . Remarkably, the program was actually tested before use. The error was detected, thereby saving a rocket but ruining a future factoid. The demise of the rocket has been widely reported and has become part of programmer folklore.Reference: Fortran Story - The Real Scoop, Forum on Risks to the Public in Computer and Related Systems, Vol. 9 #54 , ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, 1989.
Regards
Brian Blank
Department of Mathematics
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, MO 63130
email: brian@math.wustl.edu
http://ascc.artsci.wustl.edu/~bblank/