Fortran 2000 Committee Draft 274
The formal position is that a CD (Committee Draft) Registration and Approval Ballot is in progress. The deadline for comments (from national bodies) is 27 December. Each national body will have its own deadline ahead of 27 December, so be sure to submit your personal comments to your national body well before then. For the USA, they should be sent to Deborah Donovan, email: ddonovan@itic.org. For the UK, they should be sent to David Muxworthy, email: d.muxworthy@ed.ac.uk.
John Reid, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 Convener
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ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1494
Committee Draft revision of ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997 - Programming Language Fortran - Part 1: Base language
Abstract
Fortran is a computer language for scientific and technical programming that is tailored for efficient run-time execution on a wide variety of processors. It was first standardized in 1966 and the standard has since been revised three times (1978, 1991, 1997). The revision of 1991 was major and those of 1978 and 1997 were relatively minor. This proposed fourth revision is major and has been made following a meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 in 1997 that considered all the requirements of users, as expressed through their national bodies.
The significant enhancements in the 1991 revision were dynamic storage, structures, derived types, pointers, type parameterization, modules, and array language. The main thrust of the 1997 revision was in connection with alignment with HPF (High Performance Fortran).
The major enhancements for this revision are
(1) Derived type enhancements: parameterized derived types, improved control of accessibility, improved structure constructors, and finalizers.
(2) Object oriented programming support: type extension and inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic type allocation, and type-bound procedures.
(3) Data manipulation enhancements: allocatable components, deferred type parameters, VOLATILE attribute, explicit type specification in array constructors, pointer enhancements, extended initialization expressions, and enhanced intrinsic procedures.
(4) Input/output enhancements: asynchronous transfer, stream access, user specified transfer operations for derived types, user specified control of rounding during format conversions, named constants for preconnected units, the flush statement, regularization of keywords, and access to error messages.
(5) Procedure pointers.
(6) Support for IEC 60559 (IEEE 754) exceptions.
(7) Interoperability with the C programming language.
(8) Support for international usage: access to ISO 10646 4-byte characters and choice of decimal or comma in numeric formatted input/output.
(9) Enhanced integration with the host operating system: access to command line arguments, environment variables, and processor error messages.
In addition, there are numerous minor enhancements.
Except in extremely minor ways, this revision is upwards compatible with the current standard, that is, a program that conforms to the present standard will conform to the revised standard.
The enhancements are in response to demands from users and will keep Fortran appropriate for the needs of present-day programmers without losing the vast investment in existing programs.
latex..hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Now who says Fortran is not a sexy language ?? hum ?
What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just curious I guess.
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2, Funny)
2.
3.
4.
I think you have a bigger problem.
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:3, Informative)
The main pain with such libraries is the amount of effort that goes on into debugging and evaluating the code. In case of many Fortran libraries for numerical analysis, a lot of that work is already done. While, porting it to C/C++ or Java appears trivial (in most cases it is also not trivial), doing the QA involves unacceptable costs.
There is also a thing or two to be said about the speeds, which many folks have noted.
S
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:5, Informative)
The list goes on and on, but these are changes that where implemented in Fortran90. Since then, attepts have been made to turn Fortran into an OO language. Aid i18n and other things to make Fortran less of a CS language.
The reason you might want to try out Fortran is because of speed. Under gcc/Linux C may be the fastest language, but under Solaris, Irix, AIX and other oldschool OSes, Fortran is still speed king, for two reasons.
Firstly, the Fortran compilers are well tuned mature products under these platforms.
Secondly, the Fortran language makes all kinds of assumptions that the programmer must adhere to. Example: If a function recives two arrays, they must not overlap. This allows Fortran compilers to do loop unrolling in cases where a C-compiler cannot.
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:3, Informative)
- Didn't use punch cards: VT100s baby
- Only comments and statement numbers had fixed columns: you're thinking of FORTRAN IV.
- Clarification: 1 through 72 code, 73 through 80 were comments.
- Dynamic memory allocation existed as a DEC extension to VAX FORTRAN. Lots of other hardware manufacturers provided the same capability, it just wasn't standard.
- ...and explain to me the difference between a global variable and a variable in a common block.
Also, last I checked (admitedly a while ago), FORTRAN under Linux gcc was translated to C for compilation.GCC compiles FORTRAN natively... (Score:2)
...and has done so for quite some time. None of the languages bundled with GCC first translate into C.
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2)
Fortran may be faster for your particular application. But it may be slower. If performance is that important then you have to write both and benchmark them. If performance isn't that important then other considerations (availability of libraries) dominate.
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:4, Informative)
Fortran is still used quite a bit in scientific and engineering circles. There is a HUGE code base that people (understandably) do not want to give up. I spent three years in the mid-90's developing groundwater numerical models with Fortran90.
Some reasearch instutituions and software development companies have starting using C; however, mainly for pre- and post-processors. Many are still using Fortran numerical engines.
Another reason that Fortran was still popular (at least through the 90's) was that some of the major compilers (Such as IBMs Fortran complier) ROCKED. Some simulations that I was working on took weeks to peform and the compliers were very good at optimizing the Fortran code -- without the scientist getting too close to the hardware.
I must admit; however, that today all my programming is either done in C, Objective-C, or Perl -- even though gcc will compile Fortran code. (Can you believe I wrote a postscript driver for printing evelopes on our lab's printer in Fortran! )
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2, Informative)
Man! I hate being called a liar -- OK, you asked for it! -- Here is the code. The executable was wrapped in a shell scrip that shuffled everything nicely along -- it also required standard input file (text) to define the address for the envelope
A link to "EV" Fortran source code [mac.com]Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:3, Interesting)
Loadsa stuff on Fortran and genome mapping here [mathtools.net] This site has thousands of contemporary applications of Fortran. Just follow the link back up ...
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, F'90 didn't have true OO in it; it had just introduced "MODULE"s, and for those couple of us rebellious "young'uns" that embraced it, '90 was far and away better. I'm personally a big fan of more complete OO programming, but the bosses and supervisors here just cannot comprehend what it even is. (I've tried to explain it several times... their perspective, and perhaps refusal to learn from someone half their age, prevents their understanding at why OO is, generally, a Good Thing). Are the current Fortran languages similar? Well, in the sense that C++ is (or can be) similar to C, then yes... assuming you only code to the bits that you understand. But doing so really defeats the whole purpose of having revised the language.
For my $0.02, with where Fortran seems to be trying to head (not that I've read the referenced draft; I haven't), we might as well write and compile with C++; the vaunted speed advantage starts bleeding away with (direct or indirect) access to pointers and other things, and my experience here the past several years is that said speed difference is mainly a function of the quality of the compiler anyway. (And ours sucks big hairy ones, and I won't say which one it is.)
The biggest insurmountable hurdle here is that Fortran now-a-days is really only *used* in the scientific community, and, by and large, such community is less concerned with staying up with the new learning curve of programming practices and more concerned with getting the next thing done. (For a humorous semi-related example of this, consider our recent "port" of a well-used CFD code into Fortran '90... we changed the make file to use "f90" rather than "f77" and made sure it still compiled... huzzah! we now have a Fortran '90 program *cough*NOT*cough*...)
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2, Funny)
What will Fortran look like 10 years from now?
Who knows? But no matter what it looks like they'll still call it Fortran...
OK, not exactly a rimshot joke
Re:What is Fortran used for these days? (Score:2)
A: I don't know, but they will call it Fortran.
FORTRAN IS GREAT FOR MULTIPROCESSING (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sick and tired of IGNORANCE (Score:2)
You are not comparing like with like. Depending on how you code bubble sort can be quite fast if the items are already mostly in order.
C++ is not the frienliest of languages to write an optimizing compiler for and if you buy the standard edition of Visual C++ you don't even get the optimizer. So comparing languages on the basis of unspecified compilers is idiotic.
I have used Fortran extensively and in particular for numerical applications. My experience was that the code people wrote in Fortran tended to have a much greater number of bugs. There were plenty of libraries arround but the quality was mostly very poor. Even very well known packages such as CERNLIB were riddled with bugs, even after 20 years of development.
A competent programmer working in any imperative language can write code that outperforms an incompetent programer in any other. Most of the physicists I worked with didn't even turn on the optimizer.
Re:Java and BASIC (Score:2)
Well it is easy enough to find out. Take the Microsoft J# or C# compilers which have a highly optimized back end and compare with a good FORTRAN. My guess would be that C# and J# would give almost exactly the same results since the two languages have the same feature set. C# might have an edge since it is slightly newer and was designed by the people who wrote the back end of the Visual C++ compiler which is the base of CLR.
I would expect both to outperform FORTRAN.
The reason is that FORTRAN gives very little assistance to an optimizer. OK loops can be unrolled. Guess what? every optimizing C compiler does the exact same thing.
The only reason why FORTRAN might be faster is the static allocation model. This means that pointers can effectively be derefferenced at compile time. But that does not provide a huge advantage for today's processors.
As they say... (Score:2)
Ok, so we're not all using Fortran any more, but it isn't completely dead -- or rather, the language which is *now* called "Fortran" isn't completely dead, even though it has little in common with the original "Fortran" beyond the name.
Re:As they say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and no one cares that there isn't a pretty GUI interface to programs for analyzing structural stress, heat flow analysis, doing x-ray crystalography, etc.
Re:As they say... (Score:2)
It's interesting to see Fortran continue to evolve. Evidently a lot of people like it, for one reason or another.
Yet another language added to my list of things to learn at some point.
-John
Need a GNU version (Score:4, Insightful)
A Free F2000 compiler - that researchers here about - would go a long way towards getting Fortran coders into Fortran 2000.
My understanding is that F95 and now F00 (or whatever) are "modern" langugages.
Amazing what you can do WITH backwards compatibility if you put energy into it.
Alex
Re:Need a GNU version (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, trouble is a modern Fortran compiler is both hard to write and about as unsexy as it gets in the GNU/Linux world. Which is sad because the language is dismissed by folks who should know better, based on syntax that was obsolete even in F77.
Now we can return to the: I haven't used Fortran for 25 years, has anything changed posts? And why doesn't someone write an OO language based on C?
Re:Need a GNU version (Score:2)
g95 has been in the works for a long time (Score:2)
and is hosted right over at g95.sourceforge.net. Take a look.
If only fortran were useful (Score:2, Funny)
That being said, what experience I do have is that fortran is excessively difficult to write and lacking in some of the basic features I'd expect a programming language (I'm not familiar with fortran 95, but fortran 77
I can understand teaching fortran 77 to allow people do program for old interfaces and deal with the old code that would be expensive to rewrite, but why would you revise fortran to make it more usable? Why not just use C?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I think fortran should not be taught in college (it is required for some majors here) except in the context of the historical significance of fortran.
Re:If only fortran were useful (Score:2, Informative)
the most parallelizable languages right now
that support automatic parallelization to
many CPUs.
Because a lot of numeric libraries are available for that language.
Because it's a lot easier to write numeric calculation programs on Fortran.
Re:Why I write science in C not fortran (Score:2, Troll)
You don't get it. A high-quality Fortran compiler will unroll your inner loops for you, creating an executable that will spread your non-dependent iterations across multiple CPUs. This happens automatically. SGI's old Fortran compiler, Power Fortran, was exceptional at this. I haven't used the new F90 compiler myself, but I understand it's just fine at autoparallelization as well.
The only reason fortran is still around in science is legacy code (which is fine by me, I don't want to port it) but new code should be written in what the programmer is more comfortable with debugging.
Agreed! Fortunately, in engineering, the kids are still coming out of the schools with fluency in Fortran. That way, they can use not only the language they're most comfortable with, but also the language that's best suited for the job.
And FORTRAN is a niche language... If you learn C you can do it all.
I think we're getting to the point where C will be considered about as useful as assembler. That is to say, for some tasks it's essential. For most, though, it's more trouble than its worth.
Background on Fortran (Score:5, Informative)
For those of us under 50, here's some history of the granddaddy of all high-level programming languages.
IIRC, my former graduate advisor and professor [iit.edu] was on the team that wrote a very early Fortran compilers at MIT [mit.edu] in the late 50s, written entirely on punch cards [fireinthevalley.com]. We've come a long way in ~50 years.
Re:Background on Fortran (Score:2)
Re:Then again (Score:2)
Re:Then again (Score:2)
-Paul Komarek
Re:Background on Fortran (Score:2)
2) The language is very easy to learn; so people who are good at science but not necc. good at computer science can write good code in it.
3) It was extremely innovative when it was invented.
Compile Time? (Score:2)
Goodie! (Score:2)
The really shocking part was the function had been part of their language for over 5 years. Imagine if my Java skills were 5 years out of date. I would be making flaming applets on webpages thinking that was advanced.
In Fortran's favor, I do hear many people still use it today and it has plenty of good uses. I would like to know whether it really does, or whether the people who say that have their head in the sand. I am young enough to have missed most things Fortran, starting my programming with exposure with QBASIC then Pascal as my learning labguages.
-Pete
Re:Goodie! (Score:2, Interesting)
Could be a step backwards (Score:2, Informative)
However, it's likely that most programmers who needed features such as inheritence, polymorphism, function pointers and so on have already bitten the bullet and moved to a C++ environment; trading off some gripes about the "standard implicit type conversions" (spit) for the increase in modularity, interoperability, etc. Introducing such features into the Fortran language now isn't going to re-write thirty years of pre-F2000 code. It feels like we're going to end up with "VB for scientists"at this rate!
But the real reason that so many people still stubbornly use Fortran is *performance*. Because the language is so much simpler (i.e. less expressive) than C or Java, it's hell of a lot easier to perform optimisations on it. Good Fortran compilers can re-arrange loop nests and do all sorts of clever stuff to improve parallelism, locality, and other aspects of performance. Add expressiveness (in the form of pointers, for example) and you add many extra complications which can render the optimisations invalid. If you can't optimise it as aggressively as you used to, you've just lost the penultimate excuse that anyone is still writing in Fortran. (The last excuse is that the 500,000 line codebase they're working on is also written in Fortran
Now I'm sure that lots of professional users and compiler writers have been involved in drafting the new standard, and that these concerns have been addressed. But I still reckon that Fortran needs euthanasia, not resurrection!
There, my 2p is now your 2p
This raises an interesting question..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
And a few years later, in 1996-1997 to run some very simple simulations concerning ... ahum ... don't even remember ... it had something to do with physicochemics.
Amazingly, I failed the exam, due to a combination of circumstances:
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
The long history of FORTRAN (sic) means a large base of scientific libraries. This is also something that prevents switching to C[++] overnight. In fact I'd much prefer using F90+ for all low level code.
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
Also, (almost?) all major quantum chemistry programs are written in Fortran (usually FORTRAN77), so whenever I need to hack the programs to correct the output, or give me something new, you must do it in Fortran.
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
1980 to 1981 - Missile Applicatiopn Program - Timing and Resolution: optimize launch times for ICBMs and SLBMs to minize launch interval and probability of conflicting arrival. (IBM FORTRAN)
1981 to 1982 - Missile Application Program - MIRV Domain Generation: provide interactive planning tool for assigning MIRVed missiles to targets. (IBM FORTRAN)
1983 (early) - Can't talk about it but FORTRAN
1983 - 1985 - Over-the-horizon Backscatter (OTH-B) Radar: Track History Programs (DEC FORTRAN 77)
1985 - 1987 - Relocatable Over-the-horizon Radar (ROTH-R): Detection and Tracking related programs (DEC FORTRAN 77)
Then I got to start writing stuff using Ada.
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
I'm conflicted. I'm not sure if I'm bragging, or confessing.
Re:This raises an interesting question..... (Score:2)
A Little Late... (Score:2, Funny)
with due diligence
we draft fortran 2000;
what? new century?
Difference between FORTRAN 2000 and... (Score:2)
sPh
Re:Difference between FORTRAN 2000 and... (Score:2)
Secondly, in FEA and CAD there are always big pushes to migrate to C++ or another 'modern' language, only to be rejected because standard C/C++ math libraries aren't fast enough for high-end sci apps (HUGE matrix operations, millions+ DOF models, weather prediction, etc.), or, at least the performance/efficiency gains aren't good enough to warrant migration. Not to mention there are a scary number of MechE's and other scientists out there who think that FORTRAN is the only extant language. ;-)
Re:Difference between FORTRAN 2000 and... (Score:2)
But IRRC, a PL/I compiler will compile FORTRAN 66 code with no complaints.
sPh
Re:Difference between FORTRAN 2000 and... (Score:2)
A PL/I compiler will compile Befunge code with no complaints
(But not one which makes sense of Befunge, of course.
-Billy
Re:Difference between FORTRAN 2000 and... (Score:2)
But seriously, I believe it is actually part of the design spec of PL/I that it compile FORTRAN 66 "decks" correctly. Of course, we know now how well that little marketing trick worked out.
sPh
What, no standardised exception handling? (Score:2)
Actually, can I turn this into an AskSlashdot - Are there any really portable methods for doing exception handling in F95?
Not Dead, living peacefully in the background (Score:2, Interesting)
Truthfully, anything that Fortran can do, C can do better. But that wasn't always the case. Fortran used to be A1 for number crunching, and thus is used and still used by many research companies. Sometimes, if you don't have a CS degree its just easier to use the language you learned when you were in University or College than spend the time learning C or Java.
Some older satellites (8-15yrs) used Fortran code. And if those satellites are still in the sky, (which they are) then those persons working on keeping and updating them need to use good 'ol Fortran to keep them up in the sky.
Each 'new' version of Fortran tries to get a little bit more object-oriented than the last. At the moment I use both 77 and 90 (neither are object oriented). Fortran also has the lovely feature of GO TO!
Fortran will probably be used for awhile longer. Even with
Re:Not Dead, living peacefully in the background (Score:2)
Re:Not Dead, living peacefully in the background (Score:2)
Thump Thump Thump... What's that noise? (Score:4, Funny)
</sarcasm>
T
Bad Fermat Joke (Score:2)
Which this margin is unfortunately too small to contain.
Fortan Rocks!! (Score:2, Insightful)
At the University of Minnesota beer usually won.
Re:Fortan Rocks!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in my grad school days (5 yrs ago) everyone who had supercomputer time was writing in FORTRAN.
Amoungst physicists and astronomers, anyone with supercomputer time today is still writing in FORTRAN. I don't see that changing in the near future. Graduate students are starting to write in different languages, but to talk to their superivsors (the guys with large existing codebases) they have to be able to talk and write FORTRAN.
Most of the time its not worth their time to port a couple of hundred thousand lines of modelling code to some other language before they can add layers on top, its unlikely it'll ever be worth anyones time to do somethnig like that.
A lot of the Java, Perl/Tk and Python/Tkinter stuff I write these days is sitting ontop of a whole bunch of FORTRAN that it would take the next twenty years to rewrite. If it works, whats the point of doing it all again? Thats no fun...
I think language interoperability is becoming more and more important now the industry is (sort of) maturing. This is where code reuse in the real world is going to come from, rather than the current fads in code design which keep on promising more code reuse.
Al.Re:Fortan Rocks!! (Score:2)
They're ruining FORTRAN!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
F77 was a cool language. IIRC, the original version of Adventure Cave used an interpreter that was written in F77. It is also one of the few languages that have native support for imaginary numbers (some versions of APL did as well).
Looking at the summary of changes, I suspect that they've finally messed up the things that made FORTRAN (or at least F77) great. The addition of pointers stands an excellent chance of rendering code un-optimizable, and I fear that adding OO features is an even bigger mistake. I would have liked to have seen Unicode support and exception handling, and that's about it.
Re:They're ruining FORTRAN!!! (Score:2)
Looking at the summary of changes, I suspect that they've finally messed up the things that made FORTRAN (or at least F77) great. The addition of pointers stands an excellent chance of rendering code un-optimizable, and I fear that adding OO features is an even bigger mistake.
FORTRAN went OO during with Fortran90 and pointers were added with Fortran95, although for anyone used to C pointers, Fortran95 pointers are (erm) pretty wierd...
Al.Re:They're ruining FORTRAN!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
String handling in FORTRAN 66 was not very portable. On the DECsystem-10, five ASCII characters were stored per word. This was the biggest hassle in porting to another platform.
Re:They're ruining FORTRAN!!! (Score:2)
ADVENT was pretty portable, though, in spite of the string handling. For player commands, ADVENT used it's own, non-ASCII, character encoding that fit six characters into a pair of 16-bit values. This meant that even with the source code, you couldn't make heads or tails of the table containing all the verbs, so you didn't know what actions were available to you.
Re:They're ruining FORTRAN!!! (Score:2)
The PDP-11 version was probably more portable than the original PDP-10 version.
FO^H/RTRAN, FORTRAN, Fortran, ForTran??? (Score:2)
When and why did the name change from "FORTRAN" (all uppercase, preferably with a slash across the letter O) to "Fortran" (mixed-case)?
Indeed, since the name means Formula Translation, if the name was to be changed at all, why was it not changed to ForTran (with an internal upper-case T?)
Those familiar with the world of M, I mean MUMPS, I mean M[UMPS], where the name of the language either was or was not officially changed, and the language is or is not properly referred to by both names or by one or by the other, and where M is either an officially sanctioned abbreviation, an officially sanctioned alternate name, or the One True name, or was changed in the ANSI spec but not the ISO spec... or not... will appreciate the importance of such issues.
Particularly since in these modern days it's pretty safe to assume that your PC's printer is equipped with a full 192-character chain.
Hmm, I recognize those people (Score:2)
Baz's Rule Of Programming Languages... (Score:2)
"Never use a programming language that is older than you are".
So I'm just about okay with Fortran 66....
Baz
I just have to ask... (Score:2)
Does the language still have EQUIVALENCE?
Re:I just have to ask... (Score:2)
I guess FORTRAN compiler writers need to have some fun, and if aliasing is out...
regular expressions (Score:3, Funny)
[ducks for cover]
FORTRAN#, FORTRAN.NET (Score:2)
What a lot of CS people forget... (Score:5, Informative)
FORTRAN is simple. It works like many mathematicians and scientists think it should. It meshes well with what they really want to do in a good number of cases. The level of abstraction is perfect for many of them.
FORTRAN will take a long time to die because of this. Personally, I like more real-time interpretive languages like IDL. But when it comes down to something that is pure number crunching that'll take a few hours, I'll gladly have FORTRAN. That's why so much in the sciences is written in FORTRAN, then the data is output and run through other programs to do the pretty plotting and further interpretation.
FORTRAN just works, has worked for 30+ years, and with the amount of incredibly useful code still around, will still work for decades to come. Granted, I don't necessarily like some of the proposed changes, but as long as everything works like it did before with F77 code, I think no one will (or should) mind.
-Jellisky
Everytime you travel by air... (Score:2, Insightful)
To calculate aircraft performance (i.e. can we take off with x passengers on this airfield that happens to have a big mountain at the end of the runway?) all (no exceptions) airlines use F77 calculation modules that are provided by the aircraft manufacturers.
These calculations are, at least in my book, as close to mission critical as you can come. Do it slightly wrong and you may end up in the safety net at the end of the runway. Do it majorly wrong and you hit the aforementioned mountain...
The modules are reasonably complex (up to 100k loc without a GUI), in strict F77 with the mess that that brings along and are written by Aerospace majors who, if they were lucky, got a 3 week course in F77 at University.
The obvious question is why?
- F77 is the most suitable language for the problem?
- Aerospace engineers like F77?
- It's an international conspiracy?
Unfortunately the last one is closest to the truth. The modules are coded according to a standard decided by IATA - International Air Transport Association (http://www.iata.org). A standard that was created some 20 years ago and with regards to F77 of course has not changed since... Why? Because the airlines knows how to handle these modules. The I/O and behaviour is well documented and understood and to change to something even resembling modern CS practices (even F90 would be a giant leap forwards!) would require huge investments for the airlines. Something they are of course not too willing to do. There are some reason for the currently ridiculously low (in comparison) fares we pay.
Oh, and by the way, the modules are of course not in any way certified by whatever competent authority there may exist. No, in general they prove their worth by the good old method of "service history".
PS. I have not given up flying just because I've experienced this. All aircraft operations have a rather large safety margin built in. For the "ouch" picture above with the very hard mountain top, we would also need to lose one engine. This in combination with the fact that the "service history" criteria seems to work pretty good still makes flying safer than walking...
Why, why, why...? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, what I don't understand about keeping fortran alive is because its users (scientists mostly) are people who refuse to use something new and better. They all use fortran 77 the way they learnt it through a 10 hour university course. I tried to get some of my users to use fortran 90 or 95 and failed pathetically. As my boss said: "if you think you have a clever programming trick, forget it !"
So what is the point of extending fortran with polymorphism and such ? They'll never use it. As a pro developper I'll never use it (I have the right tools already: C/C++/Java/assembler/perl depending on the job).
What is the point ? So they can sell expensive compilers with the new Fortran2000 sticker on it that nobody will ever use ? Marketting gimmick ?
If I use fortran 2000.... (Score:2)
f00!
This r0x0rs, d00d!
Re:Do we care? (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely not!!! NASA uses it to slam probes into Mars.
Re:Do we care? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope this gets modded up as funny (because it is). However, I feel compelled to point out two things:
So Fortran may have taken us to the Moon, but it takes an expert system to slam probes into Mars.
Re:Do we care? (Score:3, Interesting)
30 year old code will probably be in FORTRAN.
We do still have legacy code in Fortran. Mostly stuff we inherited from other simulators - and mostly in the area of simulating the actual flight dynamics. That stuff is hard to rewrite accurately and is a *tiny* fraction of a typical multi-million-lines-of-code simulator.
HOWEVER (dragging this screaming and kicking back on-topic) there is absolutely no need to invent FORTRAN 2000 just so we can run legacy code. If it's legacy code, that's because we can't/won't rewrite it - so why would we need a new revision of the language?
All that the world needs is a good way to call FORTRAN functions from within C++ - and we already have that.
FORTRAN should just be left to die peacefully.
Re:Do we care? (Score:2)
Re:Do we care? (Score:2)
If you'd BOTHER TO GET A SENSE OF HUMOR...
Re:And surprisingly in other news... (Score:2, Informative)
Those who don't learn from the past are condemed to repeat it. So learn to appreciate it, or your next job is going to be coding in Fortran 2000.
10 if (you
Re:And surprisingly in other news... (Score:2)
1. Fortran will not die until someone rewrites all those scientific computation code into C. And this will not happen anytime in the immediate future. On top of it (the last time I tried) the fortran source generated by some popular symbolic computation packages (like Mapple) was usable (after hacking) and the C was not. C++ - not even f... close.
2. Cobol - no comment.
3. Pascal. I have been watching C++ programmers take a month what used to take me a day or so with TP for Windows or early Delphy. I know - neither of them is suitable for big projects but they will still blow away C++ for RAD even now. And I do not care anymore typing away in perl anyway
So get a grip on reality and learn a bit about these "supposedly dead" programming languages before opening your a...e (err... mouth).
Re:And surprisingly in other news... (Score:4, Informative)
But much of the time, they don't understand how or why what they've been taught actually works, which makes learning other programming languages vastly more difficult, since they're focusing on what's different in the syntax rather than on what's the same in the semantics.
Neither Fortran, Latin, nor Greek is dead (Score:3, Informative)
You compare Fortran 2000 to supposedly "dead" spoken languages with Microsoft version numbers after them.
Fortran is not dead. It is still used for numerical computation because its default pointer aliasing rules allow. C only picked up similar aliasing rules in C99, which no common compiler fully supports yet.
Latin is not dead. It simply became Italian, with forks turning into Romanian, Spanish, and French, and then Portuguese, Sardinian, and several other languages forking in turn from those.
Greek is not dead. What the heck do you think they speak in Greece?
Re:Neither Fortran, Latin, nor Greek is dead (Score:3, Informative)
Actually that's not quite right; all the neo-latin languages are directly descendant from Latin (minus perhaps local variations that are that: variations). Romanian, Spanish French, Portuguese, Sardinian, etc, were all derivations from latin (i.e. all first descendants). TO add more fuel to the fire 'Spanish' is actually a gross generalization; it should be properly called Castillian, since it was the language of the Kingdom of Castille and appeared at the same time as Portuguese, Leonese and Catalan (Occitan).
cheers,
fsmunoz
Re:erm... Fortran allows what? Vectorization. (Score:2)
Depends on how you define "large," I suppose. There might be a lot of engineers and scientists out there running numerical analysis code on commodity hardware, but an awful lot of that kind of work still gets done on big vector-processing supercomputer systems like Crays. There are still a lot of J90's out there running Fortran code for companies like Ford and Boeing, and at seemingly every major university in the world. And NEC's SX series is, according to everything I've heard so far, selling very well.
Don't assume that vector computers are dead just because you've never seen one.
Re:"Fortran 2000" (Score:2, Funny)
Ave frater! (Score:2)
Re:2000? (Score:2)
I assume with will be Fortran200X, with X being whatever year they finally nail down the final spec.
Re:2000? (Score:2)
Better make that 20XX then, just to be on the safe side
Re:2000? (Score:2)
Fortran .NET actually exists (Score:2)
FortranXP.. part of the Fortran.NET initiative.
Fortran for .NET is real [lahey.com].
That was just the first result from this Google search [google.com].
Re:First Fortran77 Post (Score:2)
Re:Image problem (Score:2)
"Penultimate"? (Score:2)
So, what's the ultimate fortran program?
- A.P.
Re:Yes (Score:2)
The real reason of course why we have a Fortran.NET is because it's being done (primarily) by Lahey, and without Fortran, Lahey is nothing. They're not about to let this ".NET Thing" pass them by.
Re:damn fortran (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... no. The language that your people are comfortable using is the language of choice. No other meaningful criteria exists.
Let's say there were some magic language, Foo, that was absolutely perfect for computational chemistry. It has standard library calls like solveThisHardProblemQuickly() and such. Just perfect.
Like any other programming language, Foo has a strict syntax. It's easy to write a buggy program in Foo, but tricky to write a perfect one. All languages are like this.
Your Fortran programmers decide they're going to abandon their preference and write in Foo instead. How many months do you think it would take for them to become conversant in Foo? How many trivial bugs will slip through in that time because your programmers weren't experienced enough with Foo to catch them? How far behind will you be at the end of the whole process?
And that's assuming that Foo is perfect. If Foo has its own idiosyncrasies and quirks, you can comfortable double those estimates.
There is only one inviolable law of computer programming: do what works.
Re:damn fortran (Score:2)
C Tell FORTRAN to goto Hell
goto 666
or if you're into phone keypads:
goto 4335