Punch card simulator and Fortran IV interpreter
Details
- External ID
- 47222010
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Punch card simulator and Fortran IV interpreter
- Website domain
- ehrlich.dev
- Launched
- March 2, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2853628536285363
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Code: https://github.com/ehrlich-b/punchcardsJust for fun, I've only spent a few hours on it so far. What are everyone's punch card emulation needs?
Enrichment
- Theme
- hobby collectibles and gaming tools
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- historical computing simulator for punch cards and fortran
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The browser UI representing punch cards and simple input is easy to vibe-code, but writing an accurate Fortran IV interpreter with legacy syntax and punch card column rules requires deep parser/compiler design.
What it would actually take: The front end is standard Canvas/SVG rendering 80-column Hollerith punch cards. The core challenge is implementing an accurate Fortran IV (ANSI X3.9-1966) lexer, parser, and tree-walking or bytecode interpreter in JavaScript. Because early Fortran ignores whitespace, uses fixed-column syntax rules (columns 1-5 label, 6 continuation, 7-72 statements), and contains archaic semantics like computed GOTOs and COMMON blocks, it requires specialized compiler engineering and knowledge of vintage computing standards.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 15 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 16 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 86 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Discrete6502 · hn · 2026-07-26 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- LunarBasic, a BASIC that compiles 2D games to native executables · hn · 2026-08-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.