From: Pawel Szymczykowski <makenai@...>
Date: 2006-11-18T17:02:15+09:00
Subject: Fortran2Ruby

Hi all,

This is kind of silly, but hopefully not too off topic for the list. :)

I made a small contribution to a friend's (food related) blog today
about the 1978 Star Trek Cookbook. The introductory chapter includes a
source code listing of an old fortran program to type and run (on your
PDP-11?). For whatever reason, I took it upon myself to convert it
over to ruby:

http://www.edibleunknown.com/articles/2006/11/17/cooking-with-trek-the-motion-picture

Ultimately it works just fine, but it didn't come out as cleanly as I
would like. Specifically the part where I had to pad out the arrays
passed to a sprintf string so as not to get a 'too few arguments'
error. If you don't feel like clicking over, here's what I mean:

fmt007 = ' ' * 2 + "\n" * 3 + ' ' * 5 + '%2c' * 20
pad    = Array.new(20).fill(20)

puts fmt007 % [ food[1], waffl[3], dish[2], food[12], dish[3],
                fryer[2], waffl[13], *pad ]

I wanted to keep it short and as much in the spirit of the original
fortran program as possible, but that *pad hack bothers me. I've
considered using Array#pack instead of the sprintf since the arguments
are much more similar to fortran's format, but I'd lose the field
width and precision control. Can anyone think of a better way? Maybe
even just a prettier way of padding the array.

And before you tell me, yes, yes... I know that ruby's not fortran and
fortan's not ruby and I'm a fool for wasting your time with this. It's
kind of fun for me though, and I know there are a lot of people out
there more clever than me who enjoy a challenge. Is it possible to
write fortran code in ruby?

Thanks!

-Pawel