I used ChatGPT to write the same routine in these ten obscure programming languages

An instructor at the Boston Latin School uses an IBM 1130 computer to teach Fortran to students on October 4, 1968. 

Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, I took a look at using ChatGPT to write the same routine in a dozen of the most popular programming languages. But as a programming language geek, I wondered just how far ChatGPT would go. Would it program in a language from the 1950s? Would it program in a language that used its own character set? Could it write code in one of the languages that wrote its code?

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And so, I dove in. I’ve used many of the languages I’m spotlighting here, so I’ll take a little walk down memory lane and include some stories about my experience with those I’ve used.

While I haven’t run the code itself, I’ve read through all the generated programs. Most look right, and show the appropriate indicators telling us that the language presented is the language I asked for.

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I’m telling you this because the headers on all the screenshots are wrong. Most are listed as SQL. For some reason BAL is shown as VBNet, and Prolog is listed as Rust. ChatGPT didn’t make this error last time, but it made today, for all the languages shown here.

And with that, let’s dive in.

Fortran

Fortran (or FORTRAN, as it was depicted back then) stands for Formula Translation. It was developed primarily for scientific and engineering calculations. Even though it dates back to the 1950s, it was often the first language taught to engineering students in the 1970s and 1980s.

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For me, it was my fourth programming language, after BASIC, PDP-8 assembly language, and PDP-8 binary (yes, I wrote binary code so I could toggle it in on the front panel of an early minicomputer). My Dad generously drove me the hour down to Newark College of Engineering (now NJIT) so I could take their first-year programming course while I was still a sophomore in high school.

Fortran was never a favorite, although it would get most calculation-oriented jobs done. A variation of Fortran is still in use today, but it’s pretty limited to specialty scientific work since many other modern languages do Fortran-level analytics, and do it better.

Here, because of the use of the implicit keyword, it looks like ChatGPT is depicting code written in the Fortran-77 variant.

fortran-77

Even though the label is wrong, the code is Fortran.

Screenshot by David Gewirtz/ZDNET

COBOL

I was a teenaged COBOL programmer. I didn’t know COBOL at the time, but somewhere around 1980 I saw a want ad for a COBOL programmer at the Northeast Regional Data Center of International Paper in Denville, NJ. It was about 40 minutes from my parents’ home, and I needed a summer job. As soon as I managed

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10-Gigabit web: Coming to your dwelling and business inside of the ten years

When I began applying the online, I was happy to have a 300-baud modem hook-up. A major business connection was a T-1, which could achieve an awesome 1.54 Megabit per next (Mbps) of throughput. Things have adjusted. Now, I have a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) world-wide-web link to my home business office — and sometime shortly, CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and advancement lab, claims that we will have 10 Gbps (10G) accessibility for residences and offices.

The first steps have by now been created. In 2021, Comcast and Broadcom confirmed that with total-duplex (FDX) DOCSIS 4 program-on-chip (SoC) units, the companions could hit 4Gbps. This was completed applying DOCSIS 4’s echo cancellation and overlapping spectrum procedures. Comcast also accomplished a thriving exam of a entire 10G connection using a DOCSIS 4-based virtualized cable modem termination process (vCMTS)

DOCSIS 4, the next technology of cable online, brings together current cable and fiber broadband in excess of cable’s hybrid fiber coax (HFC). This new engineering supports up to 10 Gbps speeds downstream and up to 6 Gbps upstream.

We’re by now accomplishing that velocity in labs. Constitution Communications, aka Spectrum, a short while ago shown increased than 8.5 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream on a hybrid HFC. This was finished without laying any cable or fiber, but by working with pre-present HFC infrastructure. 

CableLabs member, Armstrong, took it 1 move even more. The corporation introduced a 10-gigabit fiber-optic network in Medina, Ohio to consumers. This sent 10G access to far more than 3000 corporations and residences in the area

CableLabs president and CEO Phil McKinney proclaimed, “With more quickly symmetrical speeds, lessen latency, enhanced trustworthiness, and enhanced security, the emerging 10G community will actually ability the following era of innovation.” This is how:

Improved Capacity 

It sounds uncomplicated-minded but we can arrive at 10G by simply just increasing the selection of bits per second sent to subscribers. Of study course, that’s a lot easier said than accomplished. 

To assistance operators improved meet that demand from customers CableLabs revealed specs for a new machine, known as the Coherent Termination Product. This functions by utilizing the ISP’s present fiber assets more proficiently by teaming up coherent optics technologies and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in the optical accessibility community. This permits Web Provider Suppliers (ISPs) to pack far more bits into their present fiber network. The systems are now known to work. Coherent optics is already employed for prolonged-haul net spine, metro, and undersea networks.

Advancing 10G Innovation

To continue innovation momentum, CableLabs has released the 10G Problem to speed up the work of innovators, startups, pupils, and business people in producing 10G purposes. With complete prizes of in excess of $300,000, the 10G Challenge is developed to encourage innovators to leverage the rising 10G network. Six winners will be preferred, and the Grand Prize Winner and group winners will have the chance to current their technologies at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2022 trade display.

McKinney concluded, “While

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