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Fortran Bug Urban Legend

In an earlier version of my Fortran language entry , I repeated the "well-known" Fortran bug that lost a spacecraft: If a variable is not declared, it is implicitly given a type based on its first letter ( I to N being integers, the rest floats). This led to the famous case of losing a spacecraft, when DO I = 1.100 was used instead of DO I = 1,100 .

However, on 25 February 1999, I received the following email from Brian Blank, which indicates that this well-known 'fact' is just an Urban Legend after all (which shows that I am just as guilty of repeating ULs as anyone): Ordinarily I don't attempt to correct the web one fact at a time but a few days ago I received an email from a Belgian Scot who discovered one of my publicly accessible private pages via Alta Vista's infernal spider. It turns out that one of my computer factoids, the veracity of which I had confirmed in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, was wrong.

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