FORTRAN (was Re: indentation)

[Marc Saric]

Phil Austin schrieb:

> 1) Standard Fortran (aka Fortran95) is a very different language than
>    whatever flavor Aahz used in 1977.  For an introduction to
>    modern Fortran, check out Paul Dubois' lecture notes at:

Unfortunately there is much ancient f77-code around, especially in the
sientific (physics, math) field. And much is still written in Fortran
(even f77) nowadays.

I had to work with a molecular dynamics program written in Fortran 77
(the sources where from 1996...) during my diploma and my boss at this
time only knew Fortan and Basic.

This mess was the reason why I started to use Python... :-)
It does not help that there are more modern Fortran versions out there
if everybody uses the old standard "for compatibility reasons".

> 2) I'm hard pressed to think of a reason why working scientists who
>    solve numerical problems every day shouldn't be steered towards
>    Fortran/Python, at least until a C++ compiler vendor comes up with

This might be ok -especially if you have something working written in
f77 and only want to wrap it up or process the input/output with Python.
That really works great.


-- 
Bye,

Marc Saric

Max-Planck-Institut für molekulare Physiologie
Otto-Hahn-Strasse 11
44227 Dortmund

phone: +49 231 133 2168