"The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps" and Swedish cover

Dan Rabin · 14 Feb 2006, 21:30 · from 2006-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: wolfe-lists at danrabin.com (Dan Rabin)
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:30:28 -0800
Subject: (urth) "The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps" and Swedish
 cover
In-Reply-To: <43F22701.8050900 at gmail.com>
References: <43F22701.8050900 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <a06230902c017f943f053@[209.157.132.35]>

Jesper Svedberg points us to "The Computer Iterates the Greater 
Trumps", and says,

>
>Hope it's of interest.

Very much so!

I particularly note that, despite Wolfe's reported claims of 
ignorance of computers, the notation in the poem is close enough to 
the classic FORTRAN programming language to have been written by 
someone acquainted with the language.

The statement

Do 1969 I = 1, 22

would mean to repeat all the statements up to the one labeled 1969 
with the variable I ranging from 1 to 22.  There is a label "1969" at 
the end of the poem.

I take the printing of the variable name as the digit "1" to be a 
misprint--the use of "I" as a count variable is a *very* strong 
convention in FORTRAN.

DEMENSION Trumps(21) is a play on the FORTRAN statement

DIMENSION Trumps(21), which declares an array Trumps having 21 elements.

The variable N is set to 22 - I on each iteration, so it counts down 
from 21 to 0.

Indeed, when N reaches 0, an error is reported, corresponding to the 
unnumbered Tarot Greater Arcana card "The Fool".

The poem conflates the description of the iteration with the report 
of its execution, and also identifies the array variables named 
"Trump" and "Trumps" in accordance with the syntax of English (but 
not of FORTRAN).  That's OK--it's a *poem*.

Another minor nit is that, since the array name "Trumps" begins with 
a letter other than I, J, K, L, M, or N, its contents would be 
assumed to be floating-point numbers, but Wolfe flashes his official 
poetic license at the computer-room door to have the elements come 
out as English verse.

I conjecture that Wolfe's remarks about computer ignorance may apply 
to use of the recent personal systems as very general tools, and that 
he was actually acquainted with FORTRAN programming in the early 
1960's in the course of his engineering practice.

   -- Dan Rabin

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net