Python advocacy in scientific computation

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

>        F90/F95 is scary, isn't it...

>        F77 wasn't that big a change from FORTRAN-IV (F66)  (hmmm, we're due
> for another standard, aren't we? 1966, 1977, 1990 [95 was a tweak]...)

Fortran 2003 is the latest standard -- see
http://www.fortran.com/fortran/fcd_announce.html

"The major additions are Object-Oriented Programming and
Interoperability with C [...]. Minor additions include procedure
pointers, finalization of derived-type objects, parameterized derived
types, pointer rank remapping (allows viewing one-dimensional arrays as
higher-dimensional arrays), enumerations, the ASSOCIATE construct
(similar to Pascal's WITH), transferring an allocation (generalization
of the frequently-requested reallocate capability), VOLATILE attribute,
access to the command line and environment variables, standard named
constants for "*" input and output units, access to message text for
input/output and other errors, access to features of the IEEE
floating-point arithmetic standard, longer names and statements,
generalization of expressions for array dimensions and initial values,
user-defined derived-type input/output, asynchronous input/output, and
stream input/output--and this list is not exhaustive."