[LINK] Bizarre lameness in Microsoft Excel 2002

[David Lochrin]

On Thursday 06 November 2008 09:09, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> My personal preference was Fortran for aggregating data with Lotus 123 
> for graphs, over MSExcell 20 years ago. Now I rely on AWSTATS and 
> sometimes use Open Office to analyse my site logs. I have ocassionally 
> got a message about truncating the data because it exceeded the capacity. 
> This was the problem with MSExcell 20 years ago but not for 123. Though 
> I think this may be related to [computer] memory usage - Excell was 
> Windows based and 123 ran on DOS. 

OpenOffice V2.0.4 seems to handle 622-character text strings fine - I've just tried it.

But ahh, Fortran!!  Fortran is still going strong, and there have been Fortran95 & Fortran2003 releases, and I think Fortran2008 is coming (or here already?).  It's now a thoroughly modern language and supports object-oriented code, recursive procedures, dynamic memory allocation, and all sorts of goodies.  There seems to be a good article in Wikipedia.

David