Re: st: Re: FORTRAN

[Marcello Pagano <pagano@hsph.harvard.edu>]

Certainly an acronym. See OED:

*1943* /Amer. N. & Q./ Feb. 167/1 Words made up of the initial letters 
or syllables of other words..I have seen..called by the name /acronym/.* 
1947* /Word Study/ 6 (/title/) Acronym Talk, or ‘Tomorrow's English’. 
*1947* /Word Study/ May 6/2 Some new forms combine the initial syllables 
(resembling blends) instead of initial letters, as in the case of Amvets 
(American Veterans' Association)..but they still are in the spirit of 
acronyming. /Ibid./ 7/2 There has definitely been a speed-up in 
‘acronyming’. *1950* S. POTTER 
<http://dictionary.oed.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/help/bib/oed2-p3.html#s-potter> 
/Our Language/ 163 Acronyms or telescoped names like /nabisco/ from 
/National Biscuit Company/. *1954* /Britannica Bk. of Yr. 1954/ 638/1 
Typical of acronymic coinages, or words based on initials, were..MASH 
(Mobile Army Surgical Hospital). *1956* R. WELLS 
<http://dictionary.oed.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/help/bib/oed2-w2.html#r-wells> 
in M. Halle et al. /For Roman Jakobson/ 665 Take the WE counterpart of 
the SE expression to be acronymized (/North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization/), and select from each word the first one or two or three 
letters in such a way that the selected letters, assembled and regarded 
as one word, will have a normal, pronounceable SE counterpart. *1967* 
/Sci. News/ 19 Aug. 177/1 The TacSatCom, as it is acronymed, is a 
small-scale system which should be in the field soon. *1971* /Daily 
Tel./ 3 Feb. 12 Has the Establishment realised, inquires an 
acronymically-minded reader, that if the Industrial Relations Bill 
becomes law, it will not be only Ireland that is saddled with an IRA? 
*1972* /Sat. Rev./ (U.S.) 3 June 30 Nitrogen oxide, acronymed NO/x/, is 
another of the plant's noxious by-products. *1981* /Amer. Speech/ LVI. 
65 /Byte/ is a fairly far-fetched way of acronymizing /binary digit 
eight/. *1981* /Maledicta/ V. 99 Who were the real ‘ethnics’, 
acronymically speaking? *1983* /Verbatim/ Spring 2/2 Paulies play /puck/ 
(ice hockey) or /hoop/ (basketball, also acronymed to /b-ball/).


On 8/31/2010 11:06 AM, Lachenbruch, Peter wrote:
> Not an acronym, but it stood for FORmula TRANslation when I first learned in the 1960s
>
> Your friendly graybeard,
>
>
> Tony
>
> Peter A. Lachenbruch
> Department of Public Health
> Oregon State University
> Corvallis, OR 97330
> Phone: 541-737-3832
> FAX: 541-737-4001
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 2:11 AM
> To: 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'
> Subject: RE: st: Re: FORTRAN
>
> Richard makes the point I wanted to make.
>
> As a side issue -- and declaring a history as another ex-Fortran programmer (for a while it was my only language...) -- FORTRAN was born that way, with an all caps name, in the style of the times. But as the name is not an acronym, Fortran is now standard spelling.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Richard Williams
>
> At 03:38 PM 8/30/2010, Michael I. Lichter wrote:
> > 1. I second Tony's advice that you don't want to take the time to
> > learn FORTRAN (an ancient and nearly-dead language that I last
> > programmed in nearly 30 (!) years ago) if you can avoid it. Hire
> > somebody to help if at all possible.
> FORTRAN was old when the world was young.  Several billion people
> have been born and died since I last used it.  But according to
> Wikipedia, FORTRAN itself continues to thrive and prosper.  Among
> other things, Wikipedia says
>
> "Since Fortran has been in use for more than fifty years, there is a
> vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and
> engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the
> most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate
> modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry,
> computational economics, plant breeding and computational physics.
> Even today, half a century later, many of the floating-point
> benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are
> still written in Fortran (e.g., CFP2006, the floating-point component
> of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks)."
>
>
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