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Early in my career I was called on to figure out what the hell was wrong with a FORTRAN program which had worked just fine for years, but when a contractor updated some formulas, it stopped working.

They reverted to a backup and it worked, but whenever they tried to update the maths -- which were also full of weird, redundant calculations -- it stopped working again. Nobody could figure it out. It made literally zero sense. They'd change a long formula to a shorter one and everything went nuts.

Being very new and inexperienced, I took a deep breath and started at the very beginning and now you have to know something fairly specific about FORTRAN. You know in modern programming languages, your variable names are NOT ALLOWED to start with a numeral? FORTRAN doesn't have that.

Honest question: do you have a source on this? I started programming I'm fortran IV in 1975, and AFAIK it was never allowed...